


wax frosting

by EllisLuie



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Comfort May Come Later, Dead Klaus Hargreeves, Drug Abuse, Exploration of Vanya's Grief, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Klaus Hargreeves Need(ed) A Hug, Usual Klaus Tags, Vanya Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Vanya's isolated af, angst like whoa, drug overdose, hurt little comfort, no seriously klaus dies, season 1 AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:34:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25615954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllisLuie/pseuds/EllisLuie
Summary: Vanya knows what it's like to lose a brother. It never gets easier.
Relationships: Klaus Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 80
Kudos: 432
Collections: The Umbrella Academy, The umbrella academy





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> uh. this is literally nothing but angst, so please heed the tags. all the trigger warnings, man.
> 
> this is kind of a spiritual successor to my fic 'unseen, unheard' wherein klaus and vanya bonded over her book, but i decided not to make it a series because this is fic is so dark and i didn't want to take away from the optimistically ambiguous ending of that fic. but i did want to explore vanya's feelings in a world where she and klaus grew close over the years, only for klaus to die suddenly, and see how that would affect her relationship with the rest of their siblings. 
> 
> wasn't sure if i should even post this lol but here it is i guess

Vanya’s back is aching. She’s been standing by her window with her violin for awhile now, and the sun is lower in the sky than she remembers. Her fingers are stiff as she carefully puts the instrument away, but it’s a familiar discomfort that she finds relaxing. 

It’s been ten days since she’s heard from Klaus, and the music keeps her from panicking. That and the pills she’s been periodically taking throughout the day, almost at the daily limit. It’s not quite the longest she’s gone without hearing from him since the day he confronted her about her book, but in the years since, he’s only gone radio silent on her three times, and he knows she worries. They agreed, those years ago, that since Vanya can’t keep him off the streets, not unless she physically restrains him, which is unlikely and unappealing, he has to let her know he’s okay. Phone calls, visits, even, occasionally, letters during times he’s wrangled into rehab or hospital or prison; somehow he has to let her know he’s okay at least once a week.

It’s been ten days.

And it’s not like Vanya can do anything. He has no address, no phone, and no one she can reach out to that might know where or how he is. He’s always been so careful not to let her get too close to the life he has on the streets, always maintains a degree of separation whenever he visits. He was so frustrated when she told him she had started volunteering at a local shelter.

“I don’t want you to see me like that,” he’d said. 

Vanya doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s hard enough already to see him whenever he knocks at her door, ragged and thin and coming down from any number of different highs. She’s seen him filthy and ill and shoeless more times than she cares to count, has patched up cuts and scrapes, given him haircuts and painted his nails, has forced water and food into his hands when he stumbles in and then socks and condoms when he stumbles out. 

She hates that he doesn’t feel like he can take himself away from the life he’s living, and she’ll never stop offering her couch whenever she speaks to him, but she’s resigned herself to the realities of his, and by extension her, life years ago. 

When she was a kid, all she’d wanted was to be a hero alongside her siblings. She’s been disillusioned since then, knowing they’d never been anything more than toys, puppets, but now, as an adult, she knows there are other ways to help people. Ways that don’t need powers. So she volunteers at shelters, giving out food, making care packages, making sure the people she meets see at least one kind face that day.

Sometimes she runs into Klaus at work. Sometimes he turns around and leaves without speaking to her, without eating the food or using the showers. Other times she convinces him to stay awhile, and if he’s having a good day, he’ll follow her home.

It’s been ten days, and no one at the shelter has seen him.

Vanya is trying very hard not to panic. Klaus hates when she stresses out, and he hates it more when he’s the reason behind it, so she counts her breaths and doesn’t reach for her pills. It’s hard, though, because he isn’t there to distract her with words and stories and nonsense, isn’t there to let her know there’s no reason to panic. A lot can happen in ten days, especially on the streets, dealing with the kind of people Klaus must run into every day. Vanya’s never bought drugs or done sex work herself, but she’s seen movies and read the newspapers. Klaus never tells her the bad stories, only the funny ones, even though she knows there must be bad ones because sometimes Klaus comes back with bruises and nightmares. He doesn’t tell her because he wants to protect her, doesn’t want her to worry, but really all it means is that she has to fill in the blanks herself.

It’s been ten days and Vanya has an overactive imagination.

She knows she could call the police. She’s been considering it a lot in the past two days, even though she knows Klaus would hate it. But, like she said, she’s seen movies and read the newspapers. She doubts the police will look too hard for a chronic drug abuser who hasn’t had a permanent address in a decade. Plus, Klaus has had a few run-ins with the law, and he’s always on the wrong side of it. Even if the police did find him, they’d be just as likely to arrest him.

But Vanya’s getting desperate. She doesn’t know how long to wait until it’s been too long, doesn’t know when she should start getting really worried, worried enough to go out looking for him herself, or phone the police, or reach out to one of their siblings. That’s the ultimate last resort because neither she nor Klaus is particularly interested in hearing Luther or Allison or Diego’s comments on their lives. Besides, Luther’s on the moon, Allison’s in LA, and Diego hates her. She’d probably feel more miserable about it all if she didn’t have Klaus.

Now she just needs to find him.

But it’s late, the sun starting to set, and he’d lose it if she went out to look for him now. His worry for her on the streets is even greater than her worry for him, which is silly since she has a decent apartment and job to shelter her. Though she supposes he would know exactly what to worry about. 

Resigned, Vanya tucks away the violin, checks the lock on her door, and leaves a lamp on near her window. It’s stupid and cheesy and it always makes Klaus laugh, but they use it as a childish signal: if the light’s on, he has to come home. He isn’t always in this part of town, doesn’t always see it, but if he does, he has to knock on the door. It’s for Vanya’s benefit as much as it is for his. She doesn’t like going too long without seeing her last remaining sibling, and sometimes he gets nervous that she won’t want him to visit, particularly if he’s high or scuffed up. So they use the signal.

It hasn’t worked for the past four nights, but Vanya had made sandwiches for Five for longer. She’s persistent when it comes to her brothers.

She debates leaving out food for Klaus, but it reminds her too much of those sandwiches, so she doesn’t. She does leave out a glass of water and, after a moment’s thought, two aspirin. The first aid kit’s in her bedroom, ready to go at a moment’s notice, but Klaus always does his best not to wake her when he slips in at night, and she learned early on that includes times where he’s hurt and in pain. The aspirin is a necessary precaution. 

She falls asleep hoping she’ll find him sprawled on her couch in the morning, the same way she’s fallen asleep for the past week.

He’s not on her couch when she wakes up, but it’s also not morning. It’s 3.30 AM and she’s groggy, blinking the sleep from her eyes as her landline rings shrilly. Hardly anyone ever calls her.

Vanya knows before she answers that it’s him. He doesn’t usually call in the middle of the night, both because he hates bothering her and because he’s usually otherwise occupied. But he’s the only one it could be, since the only other people who really know her number are Pogo and the conductor at her orchestra, and neither of them are likely to call before the sun’s up.

“Klaus?” she says, clutching the phone tight.

It’s quiet on the other end for a moment, static-y and terrifying, and Vanya wonders where her pills are.

“Van,” he says, and her next breath is shaky. She’s so relieved she has to sit and blink away the wetness in her eyes. Ten days, she says to herself, but not out loud. She can’t reprimand him, not when it’s 3 AM and dark outside and he’s still not saying anything else.

“Klaus,” she repeats, because he’s not usually this quiet. He rarely disappears for so long, but when he does he always comes back apologetic and sincere, a whirlwind of motion and platitudes designed to make her smile. He doesn’t call her at 3.30 AM and make her worry more. “Are you alright?”

“I don’t know how I did it,” he says, and he sounds scared and tired and it’s dark outside and she doesn’t know where he is. “I don’t know how. I don’t want it to happen again, please, Van. I can’t do it again.”

Sometimes Klaus takes too many drugs or he goes to a different dealer that gives him tainted stock, and sometimes he gets scared. He doesn’t always come to her when it happens, but he tries, because she knows how to speak gently and soft and quiet until he stops breathing so fast. She knows to hold his hand and lean in close to whisper in his ear, because he can’t handle hugs when he’s like that, can’t hear what she says when she’s too far away. Sometimes he can’t get to her in person because he’s too far away and too high, so she’s gotten pretty good at talking him down over the phone too.

His voice now sounds like it does then, high and reedy and broken. His clumsy babbling is familiar too, because he struggles with his words when he can’t breathe right, and it takes all his concentration to remember her address, her phone number, so there isn’t any left to make sense with what he says. 

“Hey, Klaus, it’s okay,” she soothes. “It’s okay. Where are you right now? Are you safe?”

He laughs, but there’s no humour in it. It sounds like he’s crying. “No,” he says, then “Yes. Yes, I’m - I’m alone, but I’m safe. I don’t - I don’t know where I am, I can’t fucking  _ see _ , they’re all around, they won’t leave. They’re waiting for me to do it again, but I don’t want to, I don’t want to. I’m so tired, but they won’t let me sleep. If I sleep they’ll do it again, and I can’t, I can’t. I’m tired, Van.”

Klaus has said any number of concerning things over the years. Sometimes he says it flippantly, like a joke, like she’s supposed to laugh at the terrible things he’s seen and been through. Sometimes he talks in his sleep, disjointed and unclear, and she has to pretend she doesn’t hear anything because he panics if she asks. Other things he can only whisper to her in the dark, when they’re curled up on her couch together, his knobby elbows jammed into her ribs, her hair in his mouth. She knows not to acknowledge these things outright, because he feels safe enough to tell them to her but he can’t bring himself to actually talk about them.

Sometimes the things he says scare her. She’s very scared now, her brother breathing wetly and shakily through the phone, alone and afraid and in the dark. 

“Come home,” she orders him, gently, gently. “The light’s on. I’ll call you a taxi, you just need to tell me where you are, okay?”

He’s trying, she can tell he’s trying. But he’s told her before that the world is blurry and bright and smears like paint when he’s too high, and he’d laughed as he told her, his grip painfully tight on her hand. He tries to describe the streets around him to her, but he keeps getting distracted, keeps breaking off mid-word to give high-pitched whines or startled grunts. She keeps talking softly, bringing him back on task, but every word out of his mouth is a struggle, and the more he speaks the more the words get mingled with his tears. Vanya feels like the phone in her hand will explode any second, her fingers tight around the creaking plastic, and she wonders if this is what Luther’s strength feels like. 

“Hey, Van,” he says, the only coherent thing he’s managed in the past few minutes. His voice is low and urgent. “I love you. I love you, yeah. I love you. You’re my sister, you’re Seven, I’m Four. I love you.”

“Klaus,” she says, and she’s crying too. “Please tell me where you are. I can help you, I promise.”

He steamrolls over her. “Four and Seven, Seven and Four. Hey, did you know when we were kids I would listen to you play through the wall? Beautiful Vanya with beautiful music. I’m sorry I took your room, took the wall. I couldn’t hear you anymore. I miss your music.”

“I’ll play for you, anything you want, as soon as you get here.” She feels like she’s falling, like the phone line between them is growing longer and longer, like he’s on the other end of the Earth. She feels like he’s slipping through her fingers and she keeps trying to catch him but her fingers are still stiff from playing her violin for hours.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I’m so tired. Will you tell them not to do it again? I just want to sleep, just for a little while, and Ben can’t make it stop. I don’t want to do it again, Vanya, but I don’t know how to stop it. Please tell them. Tell them, Van, tell them…” He trails off, confused again. “Hey, you know what? I love you. You’re great. You do - stuff for me, all the time, and I dunno why.”

It doesn’t sound like he’s crying anymore, but there’s a strange note in his voice and Vanya is still so scared. “You’re my brother,” she reminds him softly, and this isn’t the first time she’s had to tell him. “I help you because I love you. You help me, too.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Yeah. You love me. Can you tell them to stop, just so I can sleep?”

“Okay,” she says, and she has no idea what he’s talking about or where he is but it’s dark outside and he’s scared. “Okay, Klaus. I will. Just - be safe, alright? Please, please come home when you wake up.”

He hums into the phone. “They’re so loud,” he whispers, imparting a secret, like he doesn’t want someone to overhear. “Love you.” Then the phone  _ clicks  _ and he’s gone.

Vanya sets down the phone and cries.

-

She calls in sick to orchestra practice in the morning, as soon as the sun rays have settled softly around her living room. Peter isn’t happy and she knows he’ll have words for her later, but she’s only the third chair and they won’t miss her. Normally, she hates jeopardizing her position in the orchestra, because the violin has always been the only thing that’s truly, uniquely hers in a household of superheroes, and she’s all too aware of how easy it is to let things fall out of reach. 

Normally, Klaus doesn’t call her at 3.30 AM frantic and upset and obviously on a volatile cocktail of far too many drugs.

So Vanya calls in sick and doesn’t leave her apartment, standing by her window with her bow in her hand for hours and hours, playing every song, every piece that Klaus has ever exclaimed over. He’s always expressive about her music, always likes to be encouraging, and he can sit and listen to her play for days on end if she lets him. She plays a lot of pieces.

He doesn’t show up at her door.

By the time the sun moves past its highest point in the sky, she has to stop playing because her hands are shaking too badly. Eleven days, she adds to her tally, then changes it to one. Technically, his phone call counts as checking in, right? That had been part of the rules, those years ago, that he can contact her however is easiest, by visit or by phone or by  _ fucking carrier pigeon, Van _ . But his check-ins are supposed to ease her anxiety, not worsen it, and he’d been so high. She hasn’t seen or heard him that high in ages. 

With her door open to him and her violin always primed to play, he’s eased off, just a little, just off the harder stuff. He smokes like a chimney and pops more pills than she does, but last month she’d splurged on a cupcake from the bakery closest to the theatre, shitty candle and all, to celebrate twelve months needle free. She’d been nervous and embarrassed to do it, had almost dumped it in the trash on the way home at least half a dozen times, but his face had lit up like a kid at Christmas when he’d seen it. He’d blown out the candle on his third try and they’d split the cupcake, halfsies. She’d smeared frosting on his nose. He’d laughed as he struggled to lick it off.

Pills don’t get him that sloppy, desperate kind of high, and it makes Vanya ache. Is that why he'd stayed away for so long? Had he slipped, taken something he was ashamed of, afraid of what she might say, might think? She wouldn’t have turned him away, and she’s so very scared that he doesn’t know that. She’d have been disappointed and sorry and tired, but she would have pulled out the spare pillows and blanket and made him tea. She would have bought another cupcake, would buy a hundred cupcakes, one for every day if he thought it would help.

She  _ will  _ help him, she tells herself firmly. As soon as he gets home.

The apartment is so quiet and empty, she thinks. She’s always valued privacy and time to herself, had learned to like it back at the Academy when the only other option was to hate it, and she’s lived here for many happy years now. It’s cozy and worn and it feels like home in a way the Academy never has. It’s hers, completely, but there’s still touches of her brother around: A pair of shoes he’d worn through sits near the door, holes in the sole, but he’d asked her to keep them in case he ever needs to tie an outfit together. Some of his absent minded doodles are scattered across the coffee table, drawn on any vaguely flat surface - in the margins of some of her sheet music, on tissues and napkins, a tiny eye carved into the table itself. One of her cardigans is still draped over the couch, a remnant she hasn’t bothered to put away from the last time he was here and paraded around in some of her clothes. She’s too short compared to him, and nothing ever fits right on him, too tight or too short or baggy in the shoulders. But he’d loved every second of it and she’d loved listening to him laugh and hearing him tease her about the number of button down shirts in her closest.

It’s his home, too, and she keeps telling him that but he never believes her. 

She makes dinner for two and eats alone. She spends the evening fighting with herself, turning the same argument over and over in her mind, examining it from every side, every angle. She needs to find her brother, that’s obvious, she just needs to figure out how. Police or Diego or Pogo, except none of them, because police means arrest, Diego means fighting, and Pogo means Dad. But Klaus, Klaus, Klaus needs help, he’s alone and he’s relapsed and he’d sounded so frightened. Vanya needs to find him so that she can make sure he’s okay, and so that he can make sure she’s okay, too. He worries.

The phone call doesn’t count as checking in, she decides. Klaus should, would, realise how upset she must be as soon as he can think clearly again, and he’ll contact her, sincere and apologetic and safe. But she hasn’t heard from him yet, and that means he isn’t thinking clearly, which means he must still be - like that. 

Vanya leaves the lamp burning in the window when she reluctantly goes to bed. 

She’s woken by another phone call, this time at the more respectable hour of 7 AM. Klaus would think that’s funny, of course, calling Seven at 7, but there’s a knot of anxiety in her belly and she swallows one of her pills before she answers. 

_ Premonition _ , Klaus’s voice whispers in her ear, followed by his laughter.  _ I thought I was the medium in the family? Medium Four, halfway between one and seven! _

“Vanya Hargreeves?” says the voice on the other end of the phone, and it’s not her brother. “We have you on record as the next of kin for a Klaus Hargreeves.”

And Vanya just - floats. 

-

They tell her it was an accidental overdose. 

They’re sympathetic, of course, all soft words and kind gestures, helping her sit, bringing her coffee, but she sees the pity in their eyes. The judgement. To them, she’s just the poor, misguided sister of a hopeless junkie, believing him when he tells her he doesn’t do heroin anymore. She doesn’t have the energy to argue with them, to defend her brother to them, but it’s not like it matters anyway. Klaus is dead. Her protection doesn’t do him any more good now than it did in life.

They tell her he died the night he called her. Mere hours later, in fact, just before he could see the sunrise. He was asleep, at the time, wouldn’t have felt it, and Vanya wonders if that’s supposed to make her feel better. She remembers the sound of his voice when he’d told her he was tired. Remembers telling him he could sleep, that she’d help him when he woke up. Someone is kind enough to point her in the direction of the bathroom in time for her to be sick.

She wonders what she’d been doing, while he was dying alone, in the dark. Fretting after him, probably, in those nervous hours between his call and speaking to Peter. Worrying, imagining the worst. Except she hadn’t quite pictured this, so maybe she hadn’t considered the worst, after all.

Vanya knows what it’s like to lose a brother. She’s been through it twice already, is already familiar with the denial and the exhaustion and the grief. 

But she’d been thirteen when Five left, a child too stubborn to believe he could really be dead, and she’d carried that with her into adulthood, somewhat. She doesn’t think she’ll ever see him again, but they’d never had a funeral and she likes to pretend, sometimes, likes to imagine what he’s doing now. A house, a job, a family, apart from them. The one and only escapee from the Umbrella Academy.

Ben had been different. She’d felt grief then, real grief, for the first time. But she’d been eighteen and already living away from the Academy, and she loved Ben, but she hadn’t spoken to him in years and had never really known him. Strangers living under the same roof.

In Klaus, she’s lost another brother, but she’s also lost a friend. Her best friend. Familiar grief, Five and Ben, all wrapped up into one, and she can barely breathe. She’s lost three siblings and she only has three left, and of course, of  _ course _ , it has to be the three that hate her. Dismissive Number One, who never had time for his ordinary sister. Angry Number Two, so choked with rage he’d fully turned around and walked away from her the one time she’d seen him on the street. Popular Number Three, too busy admiring her own name in lights to bother with her lowly siblings, especially the lame ones, the defective ones, Four and Seven.

First Five, her best friend, her only ally. Then Ben, a stranger, but kind and gentle and who always smiled at her down the table. Now Klaus.

Vanya’s tired, too.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was gonna wait until i finished this fic to post anything but s2 releases tomorrow and idk i'm impatient. so i'm just gonna post the 3 chapters i have written and see what happens

The police officer with the gentle words and sympathetic eyes asks her if there’s anyone she’d like them to contact. Family, friends, someone to be with her.

Vanya doesn’t know how to tell her that the only noteworthy person in her life is currently lying on a metal table somewhere, in no position to offer Vanya the comfort she needs. She doesn’t know how to look the officer in the eye and admit openly that Vanya, an adult woman, only has one friend in the whole wide world, and the only family she’s even close to friendly with is dead, dead, dead. She doesn’t know how to say any of that, so she doesn’t. Instead, she politely declines the offer and tells the officer that no, actually, she’s fine getting home on her own, really.

Vanya makes it halfway down the street before she has to stop and collapse on the nearest bench. Her legs don’t want to support her and that’s okay, because she has nowhere to go anyway, nowhere except her big empty apartment with that stupid lamp still on in the window.

No one on the street pays her any mind as the world starts to crumble around her. 

Klaus is dead. Overdosed, found in some filthy alley, probably alone and afraid, and did he have nightmares that night? He has them a lot, and he’s always so shaky afterwards, even when he tries to hide it. Vanya hopes he didn’t have them that night, the last night, hopes he had a peaceful sleep to - what? Send him off? She’ll never know and maybe it doesn’t even matter, because Klaus is dead.

Maybe she should call someone. Her brother’s dead and isn’t that what she should do, call their family, let them know? Call them for the first time in years, push through idle small talk,  _ how’s the weather, did you like my book _ , and then drop the news, maybe at the end, a little send off to ruin their day, a quick  _ hey, by the way, klaus is dead _ . Maybe they won’t even answer her call. Maybe they won’t even care.

She doesn’t even know how to get in contact with them. God, there’s only four of them left, four of seven, Four and Seven, and she hates that it almost makes her laugh. She cries, instead, and she thinks that might be worse, actually, because Klaus hates to see her cry. But Klaus isn’t here, he’s gone, and Vanya doesn’t know how to tell their siblings they’re down another brother.

Luther’s way up on the moon, farther away than he’d been even at the Academy, right down the hall but so far above them. It’s just more literal now. There’s no phone service up there, not as far as she knows, and she doesn’t think she can just pop a letter in the mailbox for him, either. Dad can probably get in contact with him, but that just presents its own problem because  _ Dad _ . He doesn’t know Klaus is dead, doesn’t know another one of his experiments is lost, doesn’t know anything. Or maybe he does, because Dad has always been over their shoulder, always watching, always observing and recording. Maybe he’d known Klaus was dying as it happened, maybe he’d known and done nothing about it. Maybe he can see Vanya now, useless and ordinary and one of only four left. The Umbrella Academy.

Vanya uses a trembling hand to pop off the cap of her pill bottle. 

Allison’s in LA, closer than Luther but only just. Vanya can maybe get in touch with her if she’s lucky, but Allison hasn’t taken their calls in years. Vanya has never tried, but Klaus told her, a few years ago, that sometimes when he was very drunk and very high and very sad, he used to try. Before he had Vanya, back when it was just the drugs and the ghosts keeping him company, he tried to call their sister. Vanya can’t exactly blame Allison for missing those calls, because she knows from experience how hard it is to watch your brother spiral into that kind of life, and sometimes it’s easier to just distance yourself entirely. But she knows Allison stopped taking calls from anyone, from Luther and Diego and even Pogo, sometimes. The chances of Vanya’s superstar sister taking her call are slim, and that hurts, an ugly, deep hurt, because Allison is so desperate to cut them out of her life that she won’t even know that it’s one brother easier now.

Diego is probably the easiest for Vanya to reach out to, but also the hardest. He hates her, she knows he does, hates her book and her daring to actually speak of the Academy to anyone outside its walls. She understands, a little bit, because Klaus hates her book too, but he never hated her for it, not really, not after that first night. She knows her book got stuff wrong, knows it’s biased and blind and mostly the words of a lonely and jealous girl, but it’s also her life, her truth. It’s her thoughts, wrapped up in pretty bindings, an open window into what makes Number Seven tick. It’s her life’s work and life’s worth, printed for everyone to see, and Diego hates it. Hates it so much he won’t even look at her on the street, won’t even acknowledge her after years of being at least  _ akin  _ to family. Maybe hates it so much he won’t even listen to her try to tell him their brother is dead.

One, two, three, four options, all of them wrong. Luther, Diego, Allison, Pogo. None of them are who she wants to talk to right now, but they’re all she’s got, because the people she wants to talk to, Five and Klaus, are long gone and she’ll never see them again. She’s so tired, still sitting on the bench, head in her hands. She just wants to go home, but there’s no Klaus waiting for her there, so it’s just her apartment, big and empty and filled with his things.

She starts walking.

The apartment is quiet when she gets home. The neighbour’s cat isn’t even around, even though he likes to sniff at the door, hoping for Klaus to be there because her brother complains about the cat hair and the smell but he always leans down to scratch him behind the ears. Vanya’s pretty sure Klaus gives the cat most of their food when she isn’t looking.

The first person Vanya calls isn’t any of her siblings. It’s Peter, at the orchestra, because she’s missed two days of practice now and she’s at risk of losing third chair. She considers just letting it happen, just sitting in her living room and letting anything at all happen, but she loves the violin and Klaus loves to hear her play, so she calls Peter. He’s impatient and makes cutting remarks about her dedication, but falls quiet for a second when Vanya forces out the words she’s been planning on saying first to her family.  _ My brother died,  _ she says, and Peter doesn’t say anything for a moment and then quietly tells her he expects her back next week.

Vanya intends to call Pogo or Allison or Diego next, but she doesn’t.

She picks up her violin and begins to play because it’s the last thing in the world she wants to do. Her form is off and the tension makes the strings squeal and she hasn’t played so poorly since she was fourteen, but playing makes her think of Klaus. And it hurts, hurts so badly she wants to stop, but she doesn’t, because the violin is the one thing that’s always been hers, and Klaus won’t take that away, not even by dying. He doesn’t get to take that with him. So she plays and she thinks of Klaus, eight years old and sharing a befuddled look with her as they watch Five work. Thirteen and high, clumsily trying to help her make Five’s stupid sandwich. Twenty-eight and listening to her play, sleepy and half-conscious, asking her to keep going every time she hesitates.

And it hurts a little bit less with every hour, until it’s the good kind of hurt, the ache of a memory of a wound. She has to stop, then, because her arms are sore and the tears have dried on her face. 

She still can’t bring herself to call one of her siblings. She can call Pogo, of course, and ask him to pass along the news, and he’ll be devastated and kind and gentle, she knows. Might even make her feel better, as much as that’s possible, because Pogo has always been good at comfort. But he’s also their father’s creation, and he can say all the nice things he wants but Vanya knows everything she tells him will get back to Dad. And she knows Dad will have to know eventually, will have to be told if he doesn’t know already, but she’s only just lost Klaus, has only known for a few hours, and it’s her time to mourn him. She doesn’t want to have to share that with anyone, not yet, and certainly not with Reginald Hargreeves. Klaus would hate that.

Because Dad will want to have a funeral, won’t he? Like they had for Ben. Like they didn’t have for Five. Or maybe he won’t, because Klaus died on the streets, a disgrace, and Ben had died on a mission, a good soldier. Maybe that makes all the difference.

Vanya has too many thoughts and not enough emotions to deal with it all. She promises herself she’ll call someone tomorrow. 

She leaves the lamp on because she forgets to turn it off, or maybe because she doesn’t want to yet. Maybe because she doesn’t want Klaus to be scared.

-

Klaus is still dead in the morning.

That shouldn’t surprise her, but it does. She wakes up and blinks at her ceiling and has to take a moment to breathe because, oh yeah, he’s dead. And she’s still the only one to know, plain Number Seven, the forgotten sibling, somehow one of four still left and the only one who knows about Klaus. How’s that for karma?

She has to tell someone.

A part of her doesn’t want to. She wants to keep it to herself, shelter it, hoard the knowledge, because it’s the only thing she has against her oh-so grand siblings, ordinary Vanya knows something they don’t, and maybe they don’t deserve to know. Klaus is hers, has been for the past few years, and none of the others have bothered to be a part of her life, and they’d discarded Klaus just as easily. It’s not rational, she knows that, but telling them feels too much like giving them a piece of Klaus that’s just hers. Her siblings took Dad’s attention, took the spotlight, took all the privileges of being born with their powers; she doesn’t want them to take this too.

But the knowledge sits like a sinking pit in her stomach, growing heavier and heavier, and maybe sharing it will help. He’s their brother too, even if they’ve never acted like it, and Vanya tries to imagine how she’d feel if no one had told her about Five, about Ben. She’d been there when Five ran away, but it would have been easy for her to never know about Ben, if Pogo never called, if her siblings never bothered to tell her. She imagines finding out about his death from the newspapers.

Klaus’s death probably isn’t noteworthy enough to garner much attention from the press, not unless a reporter makes the connection between  _ Hargreeves  _ and  _ junkie  _ and  _ Séance.  _ If they do figure it out, it’ll probably be thanks to Vanya’s book. But it might happen, and Diego might see it, or maybe someone in Hollywood will tell Allison, and they’ll find out separate from Vanya, never know she knew first, and maybe they won’t think to tell her.

If she isn’t the one to tell them, maybe they won’t even invite her to the funeral.

She practices in the mirror.

“Klaus is dead,” she says, but the words feel funny on her lips. “Our brother, Klaus.” She wonders if the words will feel more familiar when she says them to her siblings. 

Luther’s on the moon and Allison’s in LA, so Vanya calls Diego.

“Who is this?” he asks immediately, gruff and suspicious, and Vanya’s already regretting this. “How did you get this number?”

She’s never been the brave one, not in the Academy, not now, and certainly never in the face of any of her superpowered siblings. She’s always been painfully, awfully aware, ever since they were young and she stood at Dad’s side during their training, that there is nothing she can do to defend herself against One through Six. Luther’s strength, Diego’s knives, the Horror - if any of her siblings were ever so inclined, they could easily hurt her. They never have, of course, not like that, and she knows - hopes -  _ knows  _ they would never; but it’s a thought and a fear that has never left her.

She told Klaus about it, once. He’d held her in a desperate hug and let her wrap her trembling hands in the back of his shirt, even though the material had been cheap and flimsy and had stayed wrinkled even after she managed to let go. He hadn’t complained, not once.

Listening to Diego’s voice on the phone now, already agitated and his temperament not likely to improve after hearing what she has to say, Vanya can’t help but be reminded of her childhood fear. But even Diego can’t throw knives through the phone or from halfway across the city (probably?), and he hates her but he doesn’t hate Klaus. At least, not enough to shun him like he shuns Vanya. Klaus tells her about Diego, sometimes, about how he’d been softer as kids, when out of range of Luther, and how occasionally, if they meet on the street, he still buys Klaus lunch and sometimes doesn’t even yell at him about the drugs.

Vanya has never known the Diego that Klaus has told her about, has never even seen signs of him, but it’s that Diego she needs to speak to. So she forces herself to breathe instead of hanging up, imagines Klaus by her side, laughing stories in her ear.

“Hey, Diego,” she says quietly, still so nervous, so anxious. 

The line is quiet for a long moment, the same yawning chasm of silence that had opened up during Vanya’s last call with one of her brothers. She hopes this one doesn’t hold the same disasters on the other end.

“What the fuck do you want?” Diego snarls. 

She isn’t surprised by the animosity, but it still hurts. She hasn’t spoken to any of her siblings outside of Klaus in years, and she’s forgotten how much it hurts. “Diego, I - ” she starts, because she has no idea how to say it but she needs to, needs to get it out while he’s there and she’s still capable of opening her mouth.

“Forget it,” Diego interrupts. “I don’t want to hear what you have to say. I don’t know how you got this number, but don’t call me again.”

He’s going to hang up, she can feel it, and she knows he won’t answer if she calls again. 

“Wait!” she blurts. “Please, Diego, I - it’s about Klaus.”

This interests him enough to stay on the line, at least. Vanya feels her stomach churn, nauseated and disgusted, because  _ how is she supposed to tell him?  _

“What about him? I haven’t seen him in months, so if he’s crawled his way to yours for money or sympathy or whatever, that’s your problem. Hey, make sure he tells you enough for a sequel, yeah? I’m sure the press would love a piece on Dad’s most fucked up toy, but you know that already.”

She’s shocked by the cruelty, even though she shouldn’t be. Diego has always been sharp, with his knives and his words alike, and his anger had always been a barrier between him and the rest of them growing up. But she’s never handled it well, not even before the book when she was less hated and more ignored, less likely to be a direct recipient of that anger. And it’s different to hear the words directed at her but not be offended on her own behalf, because she’s accepted that she and Diego are broken, that any sliver of familiarity between them is gone, but Diego and Klaus have always been brothers, even still. She’s listened to Klaus talk about Diego, his overbearing protectiveness, his insistence on rehab after ineffective rehab, and, most importantly, she’s listened to Klaus confess, late at night and painfully sober, how glad he is that Diego still cares.

So Vanya isn’t surprised at the insult towards her in Diego’s words, because this phone call isn’t about her. But the jibes against Klaus, even obviously made out of frustration and exhaustion and purely to shock her, winds her. Maybe it’s all for her benefit, maybe Diego is only saying such cruel things because it’s her and only Klaus has ever gotten to see another side of him, but regardless of  _ why _ , it’s still unforgivably harsh. Vanya imagines Klaus at her side again, but she just sees big, stunned eyes, trembling lips, a wound to a dead man that can’t ever heal.

“No,” she says, and she doesn’t try to hide the hurt in her voice, even if it will give Diego a false satisfaction. He won’t have long to enjoy it anyway. “No, he - he overdosed, a few days ago, and he’s - ”

Diego swears. “Son of a bitch, he told me - Whatever, doesn’t matter. Deal with it yourself,  _ sis _ , I’m busy. Tell him to call me when he gets his shit together. And forget this number.”

“Diego, no, he’s - ” He hangs up, the dial tone beeping. “Dead.”

She’s stunned, dumbly keeping the phone to her ear and listening to the silence on the other end. She hadn’t even been able to tell him properly, hadn’t had the chance before he gave up on her, on Klaus. He won’t answer the phone again, not for her, so she won’t even have another chance. The thought is an ugly one, a failure.

Vanya gently puts the phone back in its cradle. She had planned to rip it off like a bandaid, three calls one after another, Diego, Allison, Pogo, quick and painful and over before it broke her. She had known it would be difficult, the hardest thing she’s ever done, had known it would take a herculean amount of luck to get through all three phone calls without some kind of disaster. But she hadn’t expected to crash and burn at the first step.

She doesn’t call Allison.

She plans to, thinks about it, looks back on what went wrong with Diego and comes up with ways to correct it, but in the end she can’t bring herself to do it. The chances of Allison picking up the phone aren’t high, anyway, and even if she does answer, Vanya still has no idea what to say. Maybe she should have just opened with the news to Diego, but he’s brusque and angry and impatient, and Allison isn’t. They’ve never been close as sisters, as friends or even acquaintances, but Vanya knows how Allison handles grief. She’s seen it before, with Five, with Ben, and she knows that she’ll need to be gentle with Allison, softer, lead into the news.

But Vanya can’t help but imagine what Allison might say. Her judgement of Klaus’s life, his choices, has never been a secret, and while Vanya is relatively certain Allison does care for them, she’d also walked away at the first opportunity for fame. Vanya can’t help but hear Allison’s voice and Diego’s words, harsh and dismissive. Klaus is dead and Vanya is ordinary and why would their siblings listen to her? Diego hadn’t, Allison won’t, and Luther has never cared. 

Vanya calls Pogo instead.

Maybe Reginald Hargreeves already knows his fourth bought child is dead and gone, but it’s clear that if so, he hasn’t shared the news with anyone, not even his faithful servant. Vanya stutters and stumbles and pushes through the news, voice hitching with a sob like a child because it’s  _ Pogo _ , and he’s always been the one to listen to her, to speak to her with kind words. He doesn’t interrupt, just lets her speak and breathe and cry, until she runs out of air and words and stops. 

“Oh, Miss Vanya,” is all he says, sounding terribly, wretchedly sad. 

Diego has always been their mother’s son, her most loyal defender, and Luther has always been their father’s man, but Vanya has always had Pogo. He loves them, she knows he does, even if Diego and Klaus and Five were always leery of his motives, his affection, because he might care about them but he’d never intervened in their father’s pet projects. Before her book, before Klaus, Vanya hadn’t understood. Then she’d learned a little more about personal training and Pogo watching and never stepping forward.

But it’s Pogo, and he’s listening to her, believing her, letting her speak, and he  _ knows _ now, he knows about Klaus. It’s not just Vanya. And he isn’t angry like Diego or distant like Allison; he doesn’t hang up on her, doesn’t misunderstand. It’s a relief and it’s wonderful and it’s terrible. 

“I tried to tell Diego,” Vanya tells him, and she’s crying again. “I couldn’t - he didn’t listen. He doesn’t know. And I can’t call Allison or Luther, so they don’t know either. It’s just me. And you, now.”

“I can contact your siblings, if you wish,” Pogo assures her. “I’m sorry about Master Klaus. I know you’ve gotten close, since leaving home. I’ll handle everything with your siblings, and I’m sure your father will want you all here for a funeral.”

She wipes at her eyes and tries to stop the shakiness of her breathing. “Thank you, Pogo.”

So she doesn’t call Allison and she doesn’t try again with Diego. She thinks about them, thinks about them picking up the phone, confused or angry or polite, hearing Pogo’s voice on the other end. They’ll be uneasy, she thinks, because Pogo never calls them, and they won’t know, won’t even suspect what’s coming. Except maybe Diego, because he’ll remember his ordinary sister calling him, telling him Klaus overdosed, and maybe he’ll connect the dots before Pogo even says it. Allison might cry, or at least pretend to, and Luther will ask how and when and why. They won’t think to call Vanya, won’t even think to call each other.

It’s the final thread holding at least part of their family together, worn thin and barely holding on, snapped.


	3. Chapter 3

It takes a few days until Vanya thinks about Ben.

She doesn’t think about Ben very often, though that always makes her feel guilty. He comes to mind on their birthday, of course, and on the anniversary of his death and his funeral, and sometimes Klaus will say something that makes it hard for Vanya to breathe because  _ oh god, Ben _ . But typically, she tries not to dwell on her long-deceased brother. 

Partly it’s because it hurts, even still, because he was so young and so kind and so close to getting out. Vanya vaguely remembers his plans for the future, his countdown to the day he would spring from the Academy, get a place of his own, maybe with Diego, with Klaus. She remembers the day she moved out, only a few weeks before he died. Remembers how it never even occurred to her to ask anyone to leave with her. 

But mostly she doesn’t like to think about him because she knows what that does to someone, what reopening the wound over and over is like, prolonging the grief. She’s seen it a bit with Klaus over the years, but mostly she remembers living it with Five. She  _ obsessed  _ over Five, for months, for years. She still makes him the occasional stupid sandwich when she can’t sleep and her thoughts won’t stop, acting almost on autopilot. It’s been over a decade since her favourite brother disappeared, but he still haunts her. She’s always been terrified of that happening with Ben, too.

So she tries not to think about him too much.

But left in the aftermath of her latest loss, days passing without hearing from any of her family, her thoughts swirl and simmer and coalesce into a final, coherent realization. Ben.

Vanya has thought a lot about that last phone call with Klaus. The finer details and specific words have escaped her somewhat, washed away by the tears and the grief and the endless violin music, but she replays it every night in her sleep, hearing Klaus’s voice, scattered and confused and afraid. She can never figure out just what he was so afraid of, what he was so desperate to escape from, what kept him from sleeping until it didn’t stop him at all, but she does remember, very clearly, that he’d mentioned Ben.  _ Ben can’t make it stop _ , he’d said. Stop what, she has no idea.

She’s known for the past few years now that Klaus is - less than stellar, mentally speaking. Mostly there, cognizant of the world around him other than the rare occasions where he isn’t, but undeniably disconnected from the reality Vanya is familiar with. Part of it is the ghosts, prompting him to see things that aren’t there, panic at horrific sights known only to him, and part of it is the drugs, eroding at his mind for a decade, weakening the already paper-thin barrier between real and imaginary. All of that without even mentioning the childhood of abuse and, frankly, experimentation.

So she knows, has known for a while, that Klaus - struggles, sometimes, with distinguishing what’s real. She also knows that Ben has always been a dangerous trigger for him. He rarely ever comes up in conversation between them, wound always too raw, but sometimes if Klaus is more tipsy than high and if Vanya is comfortable and nostalgic, his name will slip through one of their lips. Klaus’s reaction is always unpredictable. Sometimes he’s fine, launching into an old story, cracking fond jokes, and they reminisce on their childhood, on Ben, and it hurts but it’s an old hurt, faded and familiar. Other times, hearing Ben’s name will make Klaus anxious, launch him a million miles away, and Vanya has to talk him down again. Vanya hates those times, because Klaus is always so broken after, quiet and distant and too likely to run as soon as she turns her back. 

The fact that Klaus, high out of his mind and so, so scared, had mentioned Ben on the phone call is - surprisingly not comforting. Vanya aches at the thought of Klaus overdosing alone, falling asleep in an alley, with only the hallucination of his dead brother with him. 

Or maybe Klaus hadn’t been hallucinating Ben, maybe it meant something else, something worse. As much as she doesn’t like to think about it, Vanya knows that Klaus has overdosed enough times to most likely recognize the signs. His call to her, only hours before he died; Ben’s name, mingled in with the frantic rambling; the confessions of love, abrupt and urgent. 

It all paints a picture that Vanya does not want to see.

Because what if Klaus  _ chose  _ to leave her? Like Five, choosing to leave the table even when she shook her head, a horrible pit in her stomach, even then. Like Ben, still going on missions even when they all knew they were just asinine strokes to Reginald’s ego. Except it’s worse this time, isn’t it, because Five had been thirteen, a stubborn child who didn’t know better, and Ben had been planning his future, not expecting to die.

The revelation leaves her breathless.

She doesn’t know what was going through Klaus’s head, will never get to know, will only have her guesses, her assumptions, for as long as she lives. But she’s not blind, not stupid, and god, the signs are there and she hates it, hates that it makes sense, hates that she didn’t stop it.

Stupid, ordinary Vanya, useless and powerless, not able to even keep her family together. Destined to have no powers but to have to sit back and watch her siblings be torn apart by their own, one by one. 

First Five, young and arrogant and always so desperate to explore his abilities. She’d seen him obsess over his limits, seen him push himself during training, not to meet their father’s expectations but to meet his  _ own _ , infinitely higher and more impossible to achieve. She’ll never know what happened to him, not really, but she knows, deep down. Knows he must have thrown himself headfirst into the mystery of time travel, knows he must have lost himself to it. Torn apart by the effort or lost forever, who knows, but his powers took him from her, somewhere ordinary Seven can never follow.

Then Ben, always reluctant to use his powers, uncomfortable with the Horror’s very presence, but going along with missions anyway, following their father’s orders. She hadn’t been on that mission with him, of course, had been stuck at home, alone and  _ useless _ while her brother was literally shredded from the inside out by his powers. Inevitable when one has an Eldritch monstrosity inhabiting their body, but she’d never thought about it, never expected it until Luther had brought the pieces back.

Now Klaus, haunted and terrified by the ghosts his whole life. Vanya had been closer this time, had seen the warning signs, had known how bad it was, but she still hadn’t been able to stop her brother from coming apart at the seams, slowly, slowly, until he unravelled completely. 

She wonders who will be next. Luther, crushed under their Dad’s expectations now that he’s the only toy soldier left? Diego, slicing off parts of himself with each fallen sibling, getting angrier and angrier? Allison, balancing dangerously on her tall glass tower of rumours? 

There’s no hope that Vanya can help them. She couldn’t help the three siblings she’d actually liked and been tolerated by, so how can she possibly help the others from imploding?

Maybe that’s what makes her so extraordinary, she thinks to herself, coming apart in her empty apartment. She gets to sit by and watch the people she loves self-destruct from the very thing she spent her whole childhood envious over, her status as ordinary being the only thing to save her from the same fate.

She wonders if Dad has seen the pattern yet.

She wonders if the others have seen it already, have known since Ben, since Five. Maybe they’ve always known, maybe that’s why they all left her, pushed her away, because they always knew and just never told her. 

Ordinary Vanya, useless Seven, helpless to stop any of it. 

-

Days melt into weeks, slow and empty, and Vanya gets angry.

She’s never been good at recognizing and holding on to that, her anger. Her therapist told her once it’s a side effect of a neglectful childhood and a hefty dose of her pills, a healthy mix that causes the film over all of her emotions, keeping them just out of reach. She’s used to it, has never known any different, except the anger now is muted but constant, kept alive with bitterness.

Vanya’s good at being bitter.

A few days after Klaus’s death, there’s a perfunctory notice in the obituary section. They spell his name wrong and don’t include much of anything in the way of details, but Vanya recognizes it immediately. That means her siblings must, too. 

They don’t call.

It’s not even that Vanya really expects them to, because she knows better than to have any expectations when it comes to her so-called family. She doesn’t really know what she’s waiting for from them, if she’s waiting for anything, but a part of her keeps thinking something will be different, that they’ll be different. Maybe for once in their lives they’ll stop and acknowledge her, think to include her now that they’ve lost yet another brother. Maybe Allison or Luther will take a step back and think  _ oh, hey, don’t we have a sister? _ It’s never happened before, but Vanya keeps waiting.

At the very least, she’s expecting to hear about a funeral.

But weeks crawl by and the light bulb in Klaus’s lamp burns out and  _ no one calls her.  _ Not Pogo, not Allison, not Dad or Luther or Diego. No one. It hits her suddenly, painfully, in the dark of her bedroom as she tugs off the socks Klaus had knit for her a few years ago, stitch knots and holes in the heel. 

They had the funeral without her.

And, oh, Vanya really thought she’d bled out the infection with her book, thought she’d inured herself to the callousness of her family, but she’d been wrong. Because it still hurts, God does it hurt, to know that she isn’t even worth inviting to her own brother’s funeral, just because she’s ordinary. They probably stood around telling stories of their missions, reminiscing on their stupid team exercises, remembering Number Four, the Séance, instead of Klaus, the junkie. Maybe Dad has a new painting up, right next to Five, or a statue to keep Ben’s company, except it wouldn’t be Klaus, not her Klaus, because Dad hates the man Klaus is -  _ was.  _ It would be a caricature, an ugly manipulation that none of her siblings will even be able to tell is wrong.

For a moment, Vanya wonders if maybe she hates them. 

But hate is an emotion too strong to hold onto, so it ripples and fades and slips through her fingers like most others. 

The anger stays, twisted and jagged as it is. It feels wrong in her grasp, like she hasn’t quite figured out how to hold it, but it feels familiar, too, like if she just holds it right it will slot into place. She’s not used to full anger, vibrant and invasive; she spent most of her childhood acquainted with resentment and bitterness, anger’s insidious cousins. But she holds tight to the anger now because it’s better than the alternative, and because she thinks Klaus had been angry, too, and if he wasn’t he  _ should  _ have been, and she can be angry for the both of them.

She decides that same night that if the Umbrella Academy is so desperate to exclude her, then she’s done with them too. They can have their funeral and mourn Number Four all they like, but Vanya will remember her brother Klaus, have her own grief for a man One through Three never bothered to know. She doesn’t need them, has never needed them, it just took her almost thirty years to realize it; and Klaus - well, maybe he had needed them, since obviously Vanya wasn’t enough, but he hadn’t  _ wanted  _ them and they hadn’t wanted him. 

(Vanya literally can’t get any further from her last remaining siblings. They’d all been connected once, even though she’s ordinary, an unbroken string of one to seven, but then the bridge - four five six - crumbled away and left her on one side and - one two three - on the other)

It’s both easier and harder, after that.

She stops waiting for the phone to ring or a sibling to show up on her doorstep (not the right sibling, never the right sibling ever again), and she thinks about going to the Academy to see Pogo and Mom but then she thinks about Five’s painting and Ben’s statue and Klaus’s funeral, so she doesn’t. It’s actually freeing, knowing none of her family will purposely interrupt her life again, because it means she’s finally just Vanya, working her way up in the orchestra and giving lessons in her spare time. No powers, no superheroes, no dead or drug addict brothers, just Vanya. 

But it’s also lonely, being just Vanya. She’s no stranger to it, of course; she’d grown up with it, even before Five disappeared, and the first few years after leaving the Academy were the quietest and loneliest of her life, though she never regrets leaving. But she’s had Klaus for the past five years, flitting in and out of her life, reminding her what human contact is, making her laugh. With him gone, she finds herself going days at a time without having a casual conversation with anyone, finds herself stumbling to remember how to actually talk to people. She feels twelve again, too nervous to navigate conversations.

She has her own funeral for Klaus.

She goes out and buys another cupcake from the bakery near the theatre, picking one with blueberry frosting because Klaus liked the colour. She buys a candle for it even though the only options there are garishly pinstriped birthday candles, but she tells herself that’s probably fine because Klaus would have loved the glitter rainbow one she found. It costs her a few pennies more but it’s for a bastardized one-person funeral for her brother, so she thinks she’s entitled to dip into her savings.

She feels self-conscious and stupid back in her apartment, standing in the living room with a cupcake in her hand. 

Vanya thinks people are probably supposed to say things at funerals, but the only one she’s been to herself had been Ben’s, and Dad hadn’t encouraged any speaking. Plus, Ben’s funeral had been cut short by Diego screaming at Dad and Luther screaming at Klaus and Allison on the verge of rumouring all of them, so her idea of a normal funeral is - a bit skewed. Besides, there’s usually more than one attendee. No one’s here to hear anything she might say.

In the end, the wax starts to drip into the frosting and she discovers she’s been squeezing too hard because the cake is half-mush in her hand. She thinks of Klaus as she blows out the candle, then quickly sets the cupcake down on the kitchen counter. 

It droops in its wrapper, mangled and destroyed, and the frosting is ruined by the wax. She thinks Klaus would probably still have eaten it, but he’s not here and she doesn’t like blueberry. She doesn’t know what to do with it. She hadn’t thought this far ahead, hadn’t thought it through. She doesn’t know why she even bothered. It’s stupid and pointless and useless, small and undeserving of her brother, and she’s screwed up even this. She keeps telling herself Klaus would have liked it, but she’ll never actually know because he’s  _ gone _ , he  _ left _ , and no cupcake will change that, not the one she brought home to celebrate his sobriety, and not the one she’s destroyed in this parody of a funeral.

She sweeps the whole mess into the garbage.

(Then she thinks of the stories Klaus had airily told her in the past, funny stories that glossed over the not-funny parts, about times he found himself in dumpsters for this or that reason, looking for treasure, slaying a dragon, finding Mina’s lost shoe with the matchbox of coke hidden in the toe. Looking for food, he’d never said and never needed to. Food like a single cupcake with wax frosting.)

(Later, Vanya startles awake from a nightmare and has to forcibly stop herself from going to the kitchen to make a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich.)

-

Vanya stops volunteering at the shelter.

She hates that she stops, feels sick with guilt, because she hadn’t just been volunteering because of Klaus. Having him appear back in her life had prompted her to consider it, maybe, but after the first few times, she found she enjoyed doing it, helping people, even when Klaus wasn’t around. It had satisfied her childhood desire to help people like her siblings used to, except she’s an adult now and this kind of help is more important than thirteen year olds taking on criminals in hand-to-hand combat, in her humble opinion. 

But though she tries to keep volunteering, she has to stop after the first few days back, because the people at the shelter know her. They ask about her work, her life, and they ask her if she ended up finding Klaus when she was looking for him before. They tell her they still haven’t seen him and they’re worried and does she want them to keep reaching out to various connections throughout the city to try and find him? 

She finds she can’t quite tell them the truth, not when she couldn’t even tell her own family, so she tells them she knows where he is and then she goes home and doesn’t go back.

Eventually, days turn into weeks turn into months, and Klaus stays dead.

Months without a call from a sibling or Dad or Pogo, months without overdose scares or fashion shows, and months without concerts in her apartment with a single enthusiastic audience member. Months of being just Vanya.

It’s everything she’d hated growing up in the Academy and everything she’d wanted after moving out. She doesn’t know how she feels about it now.

But it doesn’t matter how distant she is from the Academy or how adjusted she is to being just Vanya, because months after Klaus dies, months of quiet and lonely and peace, Reginald Hargreeves dies. 

Pogo calls to tell her about the funeral.


	4. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in honour of chapter 4 i decided to do a klaus pov of the phone call from chapter 1. a little context of what happened and another heap of angst from another perspective. 
> 
> warning for description of a drug trip bc klaus is very high, including some dissociation

There’s a heavy, frantic pounding coming from somewhere all around him, rattling his insides, shaking everything loose. It keeps throwing him out of his body then drawing him back in, a repetitive and disorienting cosmic yo-yo, stealing his sense of up and down just as he gets his feet under him. He keeps trying to push it away, force the pounding to stop, just for long enough to get his bearings and make sure he’s still in his body, but the more he tries to make it stop, the more time slip-slides around him, faster and faster and heavy on his skin, spinning spinning spinning until Ben snaps at him to  _ breathe _ .

He gasps, getting a moment of clarity - dirt under his bare feet, bricks against his back, the wavering form of what must be Ben crouching over him - and then the pounding starts again and he’s thrown back into the abyss.

Ben is speaking, which is good, but he sounds like he’s yelling, which is not so good. Ben gets mad a lot because Klaus makes stupid choices, but he doesn’t usually yell unless he’s done something  _ really  _ stupid, which he hasn’t done in a while.

He’s been good lately, really good, too good, which is why everything went wrong, because of course it did. He’d wanted it to be a surprise, a gift, because he’s been so good lately, no needles or pills or powder or even cigarettes, just clean living all the way baby, all new him, and Ben had been pleased, had been nice, even, and Klaus had wanted to tell - someone, wanted to surprise someone who would also be happy.

But then he fell asleep, sober as the day he was born, and he’d woken up to blueblueblue and hands all over, pinching his shoulders, bumping his face, reaching for his neck, and he hadn’t understood, not at first, not until he saw Ben, face big and shocked and frightened,  _ touching  _ him, hand on his chest. 

He can still feel them, surrounding him, reaching through him, in and out, every time he comes back to his body. They’re not blue anymore but he can still see it on the back of his eyelids, blazing, imprinted, etched into the dark whenever he closes his eyes, and he keeps falling into it, losing himself until his brain comes back online and jolts him, afraid and desperate and too goddamn high to move. He can’t tell if the blue is real or just in his head, can’t tell if they can touch him or if that’s just the drugs tricking him, can’t tell if the distinction matters.

He yo-yos again, losing himself in the blueblueblue, and Ben reminds him to breathe.

“Vanya,” Ben says, then says something else, but the words drop out of his mouth like stones and Klaus can’t hear them. It doesn’t matter, though, because he understands the one word that does matter, and he squints through the blue to latch onto Ben, fading in and out in front of him, wobbling and insubstantial. He isn’t blue and his foot goes right through Klaus’s shin, so he’s safe. 

Ben’s shoulders give that familiar slump of relief when Klaus manages, barely, to focus on him, and he gestures to the street.

“Call Vanya,” he says, slowly, deliberately, crouched low and close. 

This, too, is a familiar order. They haven’t used it in a while because Klaus has been so good, but the blue had surrounded him as soon as he woke up and then followed him all the way to the nearest dealer, too bright to think, too bright to hear Ben’s yelling. The blue had stayed even as the high crept in, and that had been Klaus’s first clue that the blue was only half real. But by then it had been too late, hands already dirty, brain already slipping into that familiar pool, thoughts scattered, and he couldn’t take it back.

It takes him a long moment to remember how to find his feet, then another long moment to figure out how to stand up. Ben hovers close by, wearing the anxious expression he’d used a lot in the early days, before it got replaced, piece by piece, by anger and disappointment. Klaus finds he isn’t comforted to see it again. 

As soon as he straightens properly, standing fully, his vision goes static and the earth drops away beneath his feet, leaving him horrifically suspended. He stumbles and his shoulder hits the wall, jolting his brain back into reality long enough to catch himself.

“Phone,” Ben says, pointing, and Klaus can’t see anything except the dark and the hazy blue after effects all around them. But he trusts Ben more than he trusts himself, so he walks - stumbles - trudges wherever his brother leads.

He blinks, falls through the ground and keeps falling, distantly aware his feet are still moving. The pounding rattles his bones, makes his teeth chatter, and there’s plastic in his hand, sweaty and clammy in his palm. The ink of his tattoo pools and drips over his fingers.

Ben is making noises, but it’s not Vanya’s name, so it takes several repetitions before Klaus takes notice. It’s numbers, and Klaus is confused, because Ben isn’t Five and Klaus isn’t Five, and they don’t call each other by their numbers, not anymore, and Ben is still making the noises. Finally his brain clicks, high cresting and waning, giving him small windows to gather his thoughts before they get washed away. He dutifully punches the numbers into the keypad in front of him, trying really hard to hit the right ones because he doesn’t have any more change for a second attempt and Ben hates when he messes it up.

“Klaus?” the phone says.

“Van,” he says, surprised, pleased, because he wants to make Vanya happy, to tell her something, but he can’t because everything is blue.

“Klaus, are you alright?” she asks, and there’s something wrong with her voice. She sounds sad, and that isn’t right, he wants her to be happy, that was the whole point, but now she’s sad and - 

“I don’t know how I did it, I don’t know how,” the words fall out without his input, and the more he speaks the louder the pounding gets, the more the blue after effects get clearer and clearer. “I don’t want it to happen again - please, Van, I can’t do it again.”

Vanya will understand. She always understands. She makes them go away, with her hot chocolate and her violin and her laugh, short and dry like it’s startled out of her. He always sleeps better when he’s at her place, because even when the ghosts follow him, she makes them quieter. He wishes he was there now, because he’s so tired, he hasn’t slept since the blue took over, and he can’t sleep yet, not here, because they’re waiting, waiting for him to do it again, to make them blue, and they won’t be taken by surprise this time.

“Klaus,” Ben says loudly, right by his ear, and he jerks away, a shrill sound coming from his throat. “You need to tell her where we are,” Ben says, and he looks apologetic, but his tone is firm.

Klaus just blinks at him because, honestly? He barely knows what year it is.

Ben tells him street names and landmarks, and Klaus does his best to repeat them to Vanya, but Ben has to keep leaving his side to check street signs, and every time he does, a ghost tinged with blue takes his place, pressing in close, waiting, waiting, and Klaus’s thoughts keep getting scrambled, words tangling around his tongue. Vanya keeps repeating questions, but none of it makes any  _ sense  _ and he keeps waiting for Ben to turn blue like the rest. 

Eventually Klaus forces his eyes closed, even though it means all he can see is the dark and blue, and he keeps falling into it, a terrifying free-fall, but at least it means he can hear Vanya better, feel her taking up more space at his side. Maybe if he falls far enough he’ll fall through the phone and when he opens his eyes he’ll see her and everything will be quiet and safe.

“Hey, Van,” he sighs, already drifting. “I love you.” She knows that, he thinks, but he can’t remember the last time he said it, so he says it again. “You’re my sister. You’re Seven, I’m Four.” That isn’t quite right, he thinks, but he feels like it means everything he’s trying to say. Just in case, he makes sure to say “I love you” again, because he isn’t sure Vanya is getting it, because it sounds like she’s crying.

The last thing he ever wants is to make her cry, but he doesn’t know how to fix it, because clearly he isn’t saying anything right. Her music always makes him feel better, always has, so he tells her about it, because maybe that will make her feel better too. “I miss your music,” he admits, because the ghosts keep thronging around them and even Ben is looking uneasy.

Vanya doesn’t sound any happier, sniffling through the phone, but Klaus messed up and now he’s too high to fix it.

“I’m sorry,” he says, because he remembers cupcakes and smiles and lights in the window, and he threw that away just because of some blue. “I’m so tired,” he tries to explain, even though Ben has told him before that excuses aren’t worth anything. Maybe if Vanya can just make them stop, just for a little while - 

Vanya always helps. Always. She buys him cupcakes and takes him on day trips and buys him yarn whenever he wants. She even wears all the awful socks and hats he makes her, even when he drops stitches or makes them too small or too big. 

“You’re great,” he says, because it’s the truest thing he’s ever said. “You do stuff for me all the time, and I don’t know why.”

She shouldn’t, because even when he tries to be good it all gets messed up. Even now, even though she sounds sad and he’s only just now realizing how late it must be, that she was probably asleep when he called, even now she’s speaking in that soft voice she uses when he’s upset. She’s always doing stuff like that for him. 

He tries to listen, but the ghosts are speaking and he can feel the pounding all the way down to his toes, and it’s so hard to remember to keep hold of the phone.

“You’re my brother. I love you. You help me, too,” she says, and she’s told him that before but it never fails to make him feel warm, even surrounded by all the cold blue. 

“Yeah. Yeah, you love me,” he repeats, just to feel that pleasant jolt again. Only Ben ever tells him that outside of Vanya, and only rarely. It’s nice. “Can you tell them to stop, just so I can sleep?”

He’s so tired and Vanya always makes them quieter. He just needs a few hours, just a break to sleep and piece himself back together enough to find his way back to her apartment. Everything will be okay if he can just get a few hours of quiet, safe from the ghosts and the blue and noise. They’re getting restless, and he keeps collecting more of them the longer he stays in one place. Ben is keeping them out of his immediate vicinity, but that won’t last forever. Just a few hours. Just a nap. Vanya sometimes plays him lullabies if he asks really nicely and makes sure he looks pathetic enough.

“Okay, Klaus,” she says, a little shaky, and he almost sags in relief. “Please come home when you wake up.”

He will, of course he will, he always does, and he can’t wait to see her and hug her and hear her play. He’ll tell her truth, he’ll tell her he messed up, and maybe she’ll be mad, but hopefully she’ll still play for him, and if he behaves maybe she’ll buy him another cake. He’s not so much a huge fan of cupcakes, but he loves how happy she gets when he blows out the candles, and he likes making Ben laugh when he gets frosting everywhere. 

“They’re so loud,” he says lowly, because he doesn’t want them to know he’s acknowledging them, but Vanya asks about the ghosts sometimes, on bad nights. She’s going to make them stop, though, so it’ll be okay. “Love you.” 

He can’t remember the last time he told her that, and he needs her to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> might do another klaus pov interlude in future, they're kinda fun! :)
> 
> i'm pretending s2 didn't happen so next chapter will be the start of s1 apocalypse week, introducing the rest of the fam for more fun. i've missed writing vanya angst tbh i missed her anger in s2 :(


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Significantly more dialogue and a dash of plot this chapter :)

She’s not exactly in peak condition this morning.

That’s probably to be expected, though, because Vanya hasn’t actually been in any kind of optimal condition for months now, and even before that her idea of ‘optimal’ has been found lacking, at least in the eyes of her one-time therapist. All of that really just makes her feel even more pathetic, which she really doesn’t need when she’s standing on the steps of the fabled Umbrella Academy.

She had another nightmare last night. This is noteworthy only in that it isn’t, because nightmares have kind of become her thing lately. When she was younger she knows she must have had them, as all children do, but her pills do a decent job of preventing most if not all dreams, so she’s had to adjust to this new normal through horrible necessity. Last night was probably one of the worst, though, and she thinks it’s probably because of the whole ‘Dad’s dead’ thing.

Vanya doesn’t think she can really classify what she’s feeling as grief, per se, because Reginald Hargreeves is a lot of things and beloved father has never been one of them. And she knows what grief feels like, is intimately familiar thrice over now, and frankly the man’s death can’t even hold a candle to her brothers’. So, to say she’s grieving might be a bit of a stretch. It is strange, though, knowing her father isn’t waiting behind those doors, tall and regal and utterly indifferent to her very existence. He’d always seemed so invincible, untouchable, like he would always be there, a constant shadow in the corners of her life, quietly pulling the strings.

It’s weird to think she’s outlived him. Weirder to think half of them didn’t.

The Academy feels - different, knowing he isn’t inside. Or maybe it’s Vanya that’s different. She’d like to think she’s changed since leaving home, grown into herself more, become an actual person, but she can feel the familiar stirrings of insecurity in her chest. She’d never wanted to come back here. 

Vanya doesn’t really know what she’ll find inside. Mom and Pogo, of course, which will be nice, at least. Her siblings, which will be less nice. Five’s painting. Ben’s statue. Dad’s ashes, she guesses. The place is slowly turning into a living graveyard, a mausoleum just waiting for the rest of them to come home, and doesn’t that just make her feel ill. She wonders if Dad buried Klaus here somewhere, if her brother is trapped here like the ghosts he’d been so scared of growing up, mindless and feral in that disgusting old tomb Dad used to lock him up in - 

Oh, God, no. She’s definitely not going there. Klaus and Ben and Five are gone, off somewhere together in an afterlife she really hopes exists, somewhere peaceful and quiet and nicer than anything here. She’ll join them one day and never let them go again, and they’ll be together, a family. They aren’t stuck on Earth as ghosts, forced to observe and never interact until it drives them insane. They  _ aren’t _ . Klaus never mentioned seeing Five, seeing Ben, so they aren’t here and he isn’t either. 

It takes her a moment to wrestle down that instinctive panic, but she’s had plenty of practice in the past few months, so it barely even hurts her chest before she locks it down.

The front hall is empty when she finally brings herself to enter. She hasn’t forgotten how big the place is, because it’s forever imprinted in her memories, recollections of high walls and empty rooms, but she hasn’t actually seen it in ten years. For a fleeting moment she feels like a child again, engulfed in a world not her own, but it doesn’t last long, because she said goodbye to that girl a long time ago. She’d carried that insecurity, that part of her, for years, and it’s still nestled somewhere inside, written on the pages of her book, but she’s had five years of distance. Five years of separation, of Vanya instead of Seven, of her own life with a brother who is actually her brother.

Vanya purposely hasn’t considered the others as real family in a while. For the past few months especially, she’s been firm with herself, because she’s had to be: as far as she’s concerned, Five and Ben and Klaus are the only brothers she’s ever really had. Luther and Diego are just - extras, and Allison is just as much of a stranger. They share a father (dead) and a mother (robot), and they grew up together (separate), but they forfeited all claims to being family the moment they let Klaus’s death slide by like it was nothing. 

But it’s their father’s funeral. And Vanya is alone now, more completely than ever, and she  _ misses  _ being a sister, misses having someone to turn to, and maybe seeing them again for the first time in years, in this house - 

Seeing Pogo is painful and comforting, enough to jolt her out of the inevitable spiral she’s hoping she can postpone until after she leaves this house. He looks almost exactly as she remembers. A little more grey, perhaps, a little more stooped, but ultimately the same.

“Welcome home, Miss Vanya,” he greets, seeing her approach. His smile is kind and familiar.

“Pogo,” she says, and doesn’t hesitate to hug him. Her hands shake a little because the last time she’d heard his voice still chases her to sleep sometimes, but it just makes her hold him tighter. “It’s good to see you.”

“I only wish it was under better circumstances,” he says regretfully, but tactfully doesn’t comment on her complete lack of reaction. 

She’d never particularly wished Dad dead, and she does feel a pang at his loss, but it’s all so distant. There’s only so much she can feel, and her daily allotment has been reserved for months. Pogo is probably more distressed about Dad’s passing than she is, which says more about his parenting than her feelings, she thinks.

Vanya spares a fleeting thought to the last correspondence she ever had with her father, and realizes it had been when she sent him her book. That’s funny, in a way, because it feels like a lifetime ago, like something someone else did, a child, an insecure daughter. So much has changed since then, yet it doesn’t feel like she has anything to show for it. There’s no one at her side to prove she isn’t that person anymore, no one to remind her.

The looming elephant in the room stares down at them impassively, an observer to their reunion and a painful reminder. The painting barely looks like him, just as the statue outside only faintly resembles Ben.

“How long has it been since Five disappeared?” she finds herself asking, voice soft, gaze caught by the eyes on the canvas. It’s a stupid question, because she knows. Klaus and her have an annual tradition. She wonders, briefly, what she’ll do this year. 

Pogo shifts beside her, sympathetic, but she doesn’t dare acknowledge that. She’s on thin ice as it is.

“It’s been 16 years, four months, and fourteen days,” he sighs. “Your father insisted I keep track.”

Because he couldn’t be bothered to? Vanya has kept track, all on her own, and no one told her to. She chooses to, every day, because she owes it to Five, she thinks. It’s almost entirely subconscious at this point, and she has a matching tally for Ben. She still has to remind herself to count for Klaus every morning.

“I used to leave the lights on for him.” For Five, for months, and then later for Klaus. Something she never grew out of, never left behind. “Sometimes I still make him snacks, those peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches he liked. I used to do it in case he came home at night and we were asleep, but now...” She trails off, shrugs. 

Pogo chuckles a little, but it’s small and there isn’t any humour in it. He sounds tired. Like an old man. “Oh, I remember your snacks,” he says, then pauses. “I am sorry about Master Klaus.”

Pogo has always cared for them, she remembers. In his own way. He may be more affected by Dad’s death than she is, but in the same vein he probably grieved more for Klaus than the man ever had. She wishes Klaus could have seen that, known it before he died. It’s always been so hard to tell who cares in this house, uncertain and unsaid until it’s too late.

She can’t look at Five’s painting anymore. It had scared her as a kid, a constant reminder, like one of Klaus’s ghosts peering down at them all. She’d been glad to leave it behind when she moved out, but guilty, too. 

“I talk to him, sometimes,” she confesses. “Klaus. I know he isn’t here, but I tell him little things anyway. Grocery lists, stuff at the orchestra, jokes. Things I think he’d like.”

He isn’t here. She knows - hopes - prays he isn’t, because she can’t think of a worst fate for the man terrified of ghosts his whole life, but - it makes her feel better. Makes the apartment a little less quiet. He isn’t around to hear any of it, but if he  _ is _ \- 

“I’m sure he would appreciate the thought very much,” Pogo assures her, and he sounds soft, sad. 

“Yeah,” she says, but her throat feels tight and the words get caught. “Listen, about the others - ”

“What are you doing here? You don’t belong here, not after what you did.” The voice is hard and angry and still, somehow, familiar after a decade. He sounds a bit different than he did over the phone, but Vanya is pretty sure she’ll recognize that obstinate tone for as long as she lives, a permanent echo in her brain. Diego.

She’s had nightmares about him, too.

“Give it a rest, Diego,” Allison says wearily, and Vanya turns to see them both. “Let’s not do this today, okay?”

Seeing them takes her breath away, makes her chest squeeze unpleasantly, and she can’t tell if it’s from nostalgia or anxiety or that constant muted anger that’s followed her for months, years, around them. 

She’d expected Diego’s anger, because he’s always angry, especially at her, and she knows that the animosity between them can only have grown exponentially since she -  _ failed to tell him about klaus let their brother die exposed all their darkest secrets  _ \- called him those months ago. It’s not like she’d been expecting a pleasant time at her father’s funeral anyway. 

He looks different, harder, though that might be due to the dark look he throws her way, full of such wordless  _ hate  _ that she has to look away. He’s more scarred than she remembers and he wears his knives strapped to his chest so openly, like he’s constantly on edge, surrounded by enemies, even in their childhood home with only his siblings. It plays unfairly on her childhood fear, and even trying to remember Klaus’s comfort from those years ago does little to assuage it, because she no longer has the protection of being Diego’s sister and therefore, according to Klaus, off limits. She’d surrendered that refuge as soon as she’d dared publish her autobiography.

Allison is, somehow, just as intimidating, even without the visible weapons and general homicidal air. She’s tall and glamorous and beautiful, commanding the room easily, just as she has since they were children, a skill Vanya has never been able to replicate. Vanya has seen her more than the others, technically speaking, because Klaus would get her to rent all of their sister’s movies as they came out, and they’d hunker in her living room with hot chocolate and popcorn and heckle their way through it. But seeing her on the screen cannot possibly compare to real life, and all Vanya can think is that Allison has spent the past decade in the lavish life of Hollywood, completely unburdened by overdosing brothers and cheesy movie marathons.

Diego and Allison brush past her to the couches, cold and weary, and that’s that for greeting estranged siblings. No hello, no  _ how are you _ , no  _ sorry we didn’t call _ . She is painfully unsurprised.

Pogo gives Vanya’s arm a comforting squeeze before quietly leaving, and she really wishes she could follow him. She’d thought she was prepared to face them again, but actually being in the same room as them is telling her maybe she’d been wrong. 

She hovers by the bookcases, because she doesn’t know if she’s welcome at the couches, like they’re twelve again, Two and Three against Seven. Klaus would have made this so much easier. He’d never shown uncertainty or embarrassment around their siblings, and she used to find it borderline insufferable, exhausting, but she’d give anything to channel his confidence now.

A shadow falls across the floor, and it takes a moment for her brain to process the figure in the entryway. She does recognize Luther, loosely, because the look on his face is familiar, but he definitely hadn’t been this  _ big  _ the last she’d seen him. Granted, that had been at Ben’s funeral, and ten years is a long time, but this seems extreme. Did the moon do this to him? Is it just a late manifestation of his power? Did something happen?

He hardly even looks at her before joining the other two, and she finds herself drifting after him, though making sure to stay a few feet behind. His strength has always been present, a threat, something he never hesitated to hold over them, but it’s so much more - apparent, now. She’s always been the smallest of them, ever since puberty, but for the first time she thinks, uneasily, that he could break her with one hand and not even flinch.

She had known it would be hard to face them all again, but it feels like the universe is just taking the chance to laugh at her. Her allies are gone and the siblings remaining are infinitely more dangerous, more distant, and she has literally no defense against them.

Meekly, she sinks into one of the couches, hesitantly taking the glass Allison offers even though she isn’t much of a drinker. It’s probably best not to antagonize them so early, though, and maybe it’s a peace offering, a truce. The problem is, Vanya is still so, so angry with them. It’s not in her nature to confront them, not when they stand before her like titans, polished and dangerous and huge, but she can’t stop the dark turn of her thoughts. She’s made mistakes, made a lot of them, and some of them will haunt her for as long as she lives, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever truly forgive herself for a lot of it. Her siblings have a right to be upset with her, just as Klaus had been, but the difference is that he’d made the effort to discuss it with her instead of freezing her out. Above all, Vanya is absolutely incensed to be here, at the Academy, for a funeral, now, when she hadn’t been important enough to invite to the last. 

This should be Klaus’s funeral, and the resentment is like a beast in her chest.

To add insult to injury, the others make a point of sitting apart from her, all finding their own seats and chairs even though there’s plenty of room around her. The empty space next to her is horrifically loud, and she aches just knowing there’s only one person she wants to be there.

Luther looks pained, awkward, like a child playing pretend before them. She tries to feel any sympathy but comes up dry. 

“Um,” he says, shuffling. “I guess we should get this started. So, I figured - ”

“Whoa, hang on, spaceboy,” Diego interjects, pointing a knife in their brother’s face. Vanya is already so tired. “Slow down. We’re a man down, remember.”

Vanya flinches, hard, collapsing in on herself. Allison slides a look at her but doesn’t say anything, which she’s grateful for. She’d known this would come up, but it doesn’t make it any easier. They’re going to discuss it, acknowledge it, and they’ll turn to her, blame her, and she’ll just have to sit and take it because there’s nothing else she can do and they’re right - 

Luther grunts, looking annoyed. “I don’t care,” he says bluntly, which is - harsher than she’d been expecting. “I was thinking we could have the memorial service in the courtyard at sundown, right at Dad’s favourite spot. Whoever’s here can attend, pay their respects.”

His mouth continues to move, but nothing he says is important anymore because all she can hear is the low tone of his voice, heavy and completely meaningless in tandem with the sudden roaring in her ears.

He doesn’t care. Klaus isn’t here because he’s  _ dead,  _ he can’t attend Dad’s funeral because Dad attended his first and Luther doesn’t care. Number One, the biggest, the leader, the one they’re all supposed to look up to and he doesn’t even care. Does Allison? Do any of them? Is Vanya completely alone in mourning Klaus, just because - what? He was a junkie, an addict, just another failure on the street? She’s always known their family is twisted and rotten and broken, fundamentally, but this - this is unprecedented. At the very least, Klaus had died believing Diego cared about him, if nothing else, and Vanya spent years making sure he knew how much she loved him. 

But they don’t care. They’ve never cared. She could die tomorrow and they probably won’t even bat an eye. Maybe they won’t have a funeral for her at all, because she’s the ordinary one, the useless one. Maybe it will be left to Pogo to mourn her, to make sure she ends up with Klaus and Ben, because clearly her siblings won’t give a damn.

And now Luther is - implying someone killed Dad? One of  _ them  _ killed Dad? Because entertaining that desperate theory is somehow more important than addressing their brother?

“The last time I talked to Dad, he sounded strange,” he says stubbornly, ignoring the incredulous looks aimed his way. “He was on edge, told me to be careful who to trust.”

Diego snorts derisively, which is the first thing he’s done that Vanya agrees with. “Luther, he was a paranoid, bitter old man who was starting to lose what was left of his marbles.”

“No. He must have known something was going to happen. If Klaus were here, we could get him to summon Dad - ”

“Oh, sure,” Allison says, rolling her eyes. “Because that would go well.”

“I’m telling you, this is important. Dad’s monocle is missing.”

The conversation is spiraling, falling away from Vanya, completely out of her control. The others keep bickering, arguing, throwing Klaus’s name out like a challenge and then leaving it there without any kind of acknowledgement. It’s so utterly disrespectful, and she shouldn’t have expected anything less. They didn’t respect him in life, of course they won’t even honour his memory in death.

She wants to scream. To yell at them, make them shut up and listen, but she can’t. She’s just ordinary Vanya, the one who betrayed the family, who wasted her time befriending the family disappointment, why would they ever listen to her.

“Oh, my god. You really think one of us did it.” Allison sounds disgusted. 

Everything is so fuzzy, far away. It’s a struggle to focus, to care. Maybe that’s how they feel.

“Great job, Luther. Way to lead.”

She’s done. She can’t be here with them right now, when they’re arguing and accusing each other of murder. They’ve never been functional, never been healthy, but this is a whole new low and she doesn’t want to be a part of it. Three of their brothers are dead, they’re at their dad’s funeral, and now they’re accusing each other of killing him. She misses simple nights with Klaus, playing violin, ordering takeout, failing to complete puzzles and carefully not imploding like this.

Klaus has always been the unstable one, but at least he’d never killed their father or dismissed their dead brothers. She’d much rather be with him, even high out of his mind, than with any of the people in the house with her.

“I’ve not finished,” Luther says to her back as she hurries out, but it’s not like it matters. 

None of it matters.

-

Vanya thinks about going to find Pogo or Mom, but she doesn’t. She’s probably not fit for company, anyway.

She goes to Klaus’s bedroom.

Her first thought is to go to Five’s, or maybe Ben’s, but she doesn’t want to risk running into anyone else just yet and besides, Klaus’s is next to hers. 

Things are eclectic and garish and Klaus, and it’s comforting to climb onto his bed and just take it all in. She runs her fingers lightly over the writing etched onto his walls, scribbles of poetry and song lyrics and random phrases she knows came from the mouths of the dead. The doodles are more familiar than the words, because Klaus has hidden a few drawings around her apartment over the years. An eye on the coffee table, a duck on her kitchen cabinet. It’s kind of a pain, because sometimes he carves them into the wood, which will probably be a problem if she ever tries to get her deposit back, but it’s not like she can be mad at him for it now. 

Vanya wonders what she’s doing here. She doesn’t even fully know why she came in the first place. She and Dad hadn’t parted on the worst of terms, but they’ve never been close, and writing her book and bonding with Klaus has just distanced her further from him. He’s her father, but she doesn’t know what she expects to gain from attending his funeral. Clearly she isn’t going to reconnect with her remaining siblings. Seeing Pogo again is nice, and she kind of wants to seek out Mom before she goes, but she could have done that any time. 

Maybe it’s to say goodbye. To Dad, yes, and to the Academy as a whole, but also to her brothers. Five’s painting and Ben’s statue, the last things any of them have of the two of them. To Klaus, too, though it’s painfully obvious that Dad hadn’t bothered to memorialize him like with the other two, unless he stuck another statue in the courtyard, which seems unlikely. Maybe that’s why she’s in his room.

She should leave. The others probably won’t even notice, and if she hurries she can get home early enough to get in a few hours of practice - 

“Oh, Vanya, dear,” says a voice from the doorway, bright and cheery, and it’s Mom, of course, looking the exact same as the last time Vanya had seen her. 

“Hi, Mom,” Vanya says, and her voice is a lot quieter than she’d intended, but she’s finding it hard to get any air out. She’s never been as attached to Mom as Diego, has always been the slightest bit wary of her intentions, unable to tell what’s sincere and what’s programming, but she’s always considered Grace  _ Mom _ . 

Vanya could have really used a Mom in her life, these past few months. Robot or not, her hugs have always been perfect, comforting, and seeing her now just makes her eyes sting, even though she hates crying in front of people. It’s not people, though.

“What are you doing in here, silly?” Mom asks, red lips upturned, but the smile doesn’t make Vanya feel better. She’s pretty sure Mom’s programmed to smile no matter what.

(She’d been smiling every time she’d caught Vanya in the kitchen at night, making sandwiches.)

(She hadn’t smiled at Ben’s funeral.)

Mom knows, right? She must. Dad would have - he would have told her about Klaus. Or Pogo. She’s their mom, they would have told her, if only to update her databases. First there were seven children for her to look after, then six, then - well, none, now. They’re adults. But she has to know.

Vanya has to consciously work to make sure her breathing stays steady. “I just - miss him.” The admission is a lot harder to say than she’d expected, and she has to duck her head rather than meet their mother’s eyes. “His room looks the same.”

After failing to hear a response, she sneaks a look towards the door. Grace is still there, but there’s a look on her face that’s unfamiliar, a wrinkle in her brow, the lack of a smile. She’s studying the room with a slow, lost pace, holding the feather duster close to her chest. Vanya’s heart squeezes because she thinks she can remember Mom peering into Five’s room like this a few times, like her programming is telling her to clean it like usual but it - she - is confused because it’s empty. 

Vanya wonders if Mom has spent the past decade looking into all their rooms like this. A caretaker with no one to care for.

“Yes,” Mom finally says, turning back to her, smile returning. “Your brother always keeps his room so messy. Come now, Vanya, I’ll make us cookies while your siblings are busy.”

Vanya blinks, because that isn’t right, something’s wrong, but before she can say anything, before she can even think of getting someone to help - who would she get? Diego is the obvious choice, but what can he do, really? Pogo, maybe - the house starts to shake.

Her immediate thought is ‘earthquake’, but that can’t be right, not when it doesn’t feel like the ground is moving so much as the very house, as well as everything in the room. Some of the trinkets on Klaus’s dresser start shaking, then a lighter and several pens suddenly go flying across the room, whizzing past her head, and she scrambles away. There’s some kind of storm she can see outside the window, deep flashes of blue and cracks of what might be lightning, and it rumbles through her whole body, rattling her bones, thrumming in her head. 

“Oh, dear,” Mom says mildly. “What trouble are you children up to now?”


	6. Chapter 6

Vanya is looking at a ghost.

She doesn’t know how to file that information away properly, because everything she knows about spirits is jumbled up and scattered, just out of reach. She knows ghosts are real, she knows they look just as they did in the moments of their death, and she knows that she cannot see them.

But Number Five is standing in front of her.

Her memory has grown fuzzy over the years, the details of his face lost and forgotten, but she’s clung to him as tight as she could and she recognizes him fully, completely. Klaus had tried to draw him from memory a few times, when he crashed on Vanya’s couch and needed a distraction from the cravings, and the drugs had burnt their way through most of his childhood but it had definitely been Five on the page. They’re all slightly wrong - the portrait, Vanya’s memories, Klaus’s drawings - she knows that now. She’s looking at him for the first time in years and she suddenly doesn’t know how she could have ever forgotten the cleft in his chin, the tilt of his eyebrow. 

Klaus had told her ghosts are violent, bloody creatures. It’s obvious how most of them died. 

Five doesn’t look dead. He looks young and familiar, a suit several sizes too big hanging off his shoulders, and the others can see him too.

“Guess I missed the funeral,” he says. There’s a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich in his hand and none of it feels real. “What, Klaus couldn’t make it to the family reunion?”

Vanya’s heart stops.

Of course. Five has been gone for years - and years and years if he’s telling the truth - and the last he’d seen them, they’d still been whole. He doesn’t know about anything that’s happened since he left, doesn’t know that if he’d just come back a few months earlier Klaus would be here with them. Oh, God, he doesn’t know about Ben. Maybe he’s telling the truth, maybe he really is decades older than them, but even if he is, it hardly matters. Child or adult, how are they supposed to tell him that two of their brothers are dead?

Vanya should be the one to tell him, right? They’d been close as kids, and she’s the one who waited for him to come back night after night. She’d probably deliver the news the gentlest, aside from maybe Allison, and she knows more about what happened to Klaus. 

She carefully doesn’t think about how she failed so spectacularly the last time she tried to deliver the news. It’s different now: it isn’t as fresh, as raw, and this isn’t Diego or Allison. It’s Five, and she’s always been able to tell him anything, everything.

“We didn’t exactly get a memo you were coming,” Diego says snarkily, bristling behind Luther. “We just expected a regular funeral for the old man. Put him in the ground, get our inheritance, see each other in ten years when Pogo dies. I don’t blame Klaus for not wanting to be here.”

“That’s not funny,” Vanya says, but they don’t listen to her. They never do.

“Diego,” Luther says disapprovingly.

Five hums, eyeing them over his sandwich. He doesn’t look particularly happy to see them, and that hurts, because Vanya has been dreaming about this day for years. “Nice to see nothing’s changed,” he says dryly, and turns away from them.

Vanya expects one of the others to stop him, because he couldn’t be more wrong. So much has changed since he’s been gone, and he doesn’t even know it. But he’ll find out eventually, he must, and they need to tell him now before it’s too late. He’s already noticed Klaus’s absence, and it’s only a matter of time before he wonders about Ben. But the other three just watch him go with varying degrees of frustration and incredulity, and Vanya suddenly feels so stupid. They’re not going to tell him, just like they hadn’t bothered to reach out to her. 

This  _ family. _

She refuses to be like them. Five deserves to know, deserves to be told by someone who will actually care. So she shoves away from the table and follows him, and she doubts the others even notice.

-

She finds him under his portrait, freshly changed into their old uniform. It’s like he stepped straight out of the canvas, walked through the doors like it hasn’t been several lifetimes. 

It’s still so surreal. She half-expects him to disappear before her eyes, a hallucination brought on by grief and stress and sleep-deprivation. But if her brain was going to trick her with seeing Five, it would make him kinder, gentler. Happier to see her. Not this stranger with her brother’s face.

Her hands fumble unsteadily as she reaches for her pill bottle, but it’s empty. She’s been working through her usual prescription faster lately in an effort to combat the nightmares and grief and random bursts of emotion that come on so suddenly and so intensely. She hasn’t had the chance to refill, and she’d assumed she’d only be at the Academy for an hour, two tops, and then she’d be back home with her violin and back-up pills. 

“Nice to know Dad didn’t forget me.”

Vanya startles, dropping the pill bottle back in her pocket. Five’s looking at her with faint curiosity, like he used to observe arguments between their siblings. Like ants on a sidewalk.

“Read your book, by the way,” he continues. “Found it in a library that was still standing. I thought it was pretty good, all things considered.”

This throws all of her half-formed thoughts and plans into disarray. He read her book? That means he knows the main points of everything that’s happened since he left that dinner table, including the disintegration of their family. Including Ben’s death. But not Klaus. All he knows of Klaus comes from her book. Her biased, angry book that paints them all in the worst of lights. 

“Five,” she forces herself to say. “Look, you should know - Ben - ”

“I know,” he interrupts, and something in his expression twists. It doesn’t last, but it’s the first real display of emotion she’s seen since he arrived, and it’s almost comforting. He’s still her brother. “Was it bad?”

She can only nod silently, because they don’t speak about what happened to Ben. Five deserves to know, but she - can’t. 

“That’s not all,” she says, even though she already hates the somber look on his face. She has to say it, though, and it’s almost fitting that the only sibling she can actually say the words to is Five. “It’s Klaus. He - He’s gone too. A few months ago. Drug overdose.”

It feels wrong to tell him how he died, the words sour on her tongue, because Klaus doesn’t deserve his judgment. In conjunction with her book it doesn’t do him justice, doesn’t encapsulate the man he really was. It just degrades him down to two words: drug overdose, drug addict. But if Vanya doesn’t tell Five then someone else will, someone who never knew Klaus outside of those things, someone who won’t give his memory the proper respect. Someone like their siblings.

“What?” Five asks, and he sounds - wrong. For the first time, he looks surprised, horrified, and it takes him a moment to reign it back in. His face smooths back out but there’s a tightness to his eyes, a desperation that hadn’t been there before. “That can’t be right. I saw - ” His hand flexes at his side, twisting and clenching. 

This, at least, Vanya is familiar with. Five may not be like she remembers, but she knows grief and she knows feeling lost and off-balance in the face of it. She also remembers nights with Five, back when they were small, when he was young and confused because all the equations in the world couldn’t stop him from crying when he broke his wrist during training. She knows Five.

“Hey,” she says softly, stepping closer. If he’s to be believed, Five hasn’t actually been a child in a long, long time, much longer than her, but he looks thirteen and she’s never seen that kind of quiet devastation on such a young face before. He’s her brother and he’s hurting, and she’s hurting too. “Hey, Five, it’s okay. Klaus - he was happy, I promise.” She’s never lied to Five before, had never been able to, face like an open book. She’s had to learn over the years. “I’m sorry you had to find out like this. He would have loved to see you back, you know.”

Something painful and jagged twists in her chest when he purposely steps away from her and the comfort she’s trying to offer. Her hand freezes in midair, halfway to his shoulder. It hangs between them and she can’t remember how to drop it. Five looks away.

“I knew he was a drug addict,” he says evenly, indifferently. “Probably should have expected something like this. I just didn’t - Well. It doesn’t matter now.”

There’s a clanging in her ears, deafening and painful, and she can’t get enough air into her lungs. This can’t be happening. Not Five, too. Not the first brother she ever loved and lost, the one she always dreamed of coming back and being with her again. Vanya and Five, Five and Seven, a team within the team, her only childhood ally. He isn’t supposed to be like them.

Five still won’t look at her. Slowly, she retracts her hand.

Five rolls his shoulders, clenching his jaw and squeezing his eyes shut for just a second. A display of weakness she’s sure few are allowed to witness, but she can’t appreciate that now. She never expected to see Five again, but she always dreamed that it would be the same as before he left, an easy camaraderie, a mutual understanding. He’s supposed to hold her hand and tell her it’s going to be okay, and then she’ll do the same for him, tell him stories about concerts and fashion shows and cupcakes.

“Five?” she says, and her voice is all wrong, weak and hurt and so, so confused. 

He stiffens. “Not now, Vanya,” he says, words sharper than Diego’s knives. He turns on his heel and vanishes with the familiar  _ fwip  _ that Vanya used to wait up for night after night.

Vanya’s left standing under his portrait, untethered and utterly alone.

-

She almost forgets why they’re all home in the first place.

It feels strange to still hold the funeral, like nothing’s changed. She follows the others out to the courtyard, trailing behind Mom and Diego as if Five isn’t with them, living and breathing. He doesn’t stand with her and neither does anyone else, so she hovers between Mom and Pogo and Ben’s statue and doesn’t feel anything at all.

She doesn’t feel anything when Luther dumps their father’s ashes onto the dirt, a horrible pile of dust and nothing. She doesn’t feel anything when Pogo speaks of his devotion to their narcissist of a father, and is barely aware of the vitriol Diego spits in response. None of it matters because none of it is real. Dad is dead, Five is back, and absolutely nothing has changed. 

It really would be just like old times, complete with an inappropriate fist fight between One and Two, if it weren’t for Ben’s statue at her back and the empty space at her side.

The sound of the statue hitting the ground reverberates through her whole body. She stumbles back into Mom, who catches her, rock-steady as ever, smiling gently. She is completely unaware of the tension around them.

Vanya sees Diego unhook one of his knives, sees him turn to Luther while the others are distracted by the destruction they’ve wrought on their deceased brother’s memory, and she doesn’t say anything to stop him. Diego pulls his hand back, the blade flashes, and Luther’s back is open and vulnerable. She watches.

Five suddenly appears between them, knocking Diego’s knife off course before it can bury itself in Luther’s side, and Vanya has never seen that look in his eye before. Furious and tired and insulted, every childhood squabble paling in the face of it.

“We don’t have time for this,” Five says, flat and cold. It sends a shiver down her spine, alien and deadly, but it still doesn’t matter. “What’s the plan, Diego? Going to kill Luther? Two dead brothers not enough for you?”

There’s a weary rage in his voice, and for a split-second Vanya can hear the decades of loss he claims to have experienced. It echoes the anger that’s been burning in her chest for hours, days, years.

Diego shuffles back, angry and embarrassed, shooting looks between them all. A cornered animal. 

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he grunts, fists tight. “Ben’s statue was an accident, alright, but - ”

“But what?” Five badgers. “No convenient statue of Klaus for you to destroy?”

Now the others are shifting uneasily. 

“Five,” Allison says gently. “What - ”

“Klaus doesn’t have a statue,” Luther says roughly. His shoulders are tense and he’s carefully turned away from the pieces of Ben covering the ground. “He isn’t here because he decided to leave the family, Five, so don’t - don’t compare him to Ben. He chose to miss Dad’s funeral because he doesn’t care enough, and it’s his fault that he isn’t here.”

Five opens his mouth, a furrow between his brow, but Vanya has had  _ enough _ .

“What the  _ fuck _ is wrong with you,” she asks, and her voice doesn’t feel like her own. “All of you. How dare you say that about Klaus? He’s still our brother, you can’t just - ”

“No, no, I hate to say it, but Number One has a point,” Diego interrupts. “If Klaus cared at all, he would be here. He’s probably in some gutter somewhere, living it up, and he’ll come crawling out when he needs - ”

“No, he won’t, you asshole,” Vanya says, and she really hopes they can’t hear the lilt of hysteria in her tone. Everything is spinning, rushing around her, and she feels like she’s falling. “He won’t, because he’s  _ dead _ .”

The silence is heavy and feels like copper on her tongue. Vanya can hear her heart beat loudly for one breath, two. The world is fading around her.

“What did you just say?” Diego says finally, quietly. 

“That’s not funny,” Allison says faintly. “Why would you say that?”

Vanya feels dizzy. 

“He - Months ago, I - You  _ know _ already,” she says, and now she feels like the cornered animal. The weight of their gazes is crushing, the four of them looming tall before her, and none of this is right. “Don’t pretend,” she orders, pleads. 

Allison shakes her head. “Vanya, no,” she says, and her voice is shaky. “What are you saying? That Klaus is - is dead? And you didn’t say anything? What the hell, Vanya?”

“You’re lying,” Luther says. “I don’t know why, but you should stop now.”

Vanya takes several steps back, head spinning, and Mom smiles at her kindly. Air won’t reach her lungs right, catching in her throat, and Ben’s eyes are looking up at her from the grass, and Five is staring at her, cold and hard. This can’t be happening.

“I told Pogo,” she says, high and shaky. “The day afterwards, I called the Academy and I told Pogo. He said - he said he would tell you.”

Pogo isn’t here. He left before the fight broke out; she can remember seeing him turn away in disgust, remembers wanting to follow him. He isn’t here and her siblings are staring at her, horrified and completely taken by surprise because  _ Pogo didn’t tell them _ .

“ _ You _ should have told us!” Diego growls, and she flinches. “Not Pogo, not fucking D-Dad,  _ you _ , Vanya! You should have - Wait. W-When was this? When did K-Klaus d-d-” He stops, breathes sharply through his nose, and jerks to the side. “You called me,” he says slowly, realization dawning. “Months ago. You called me and said it was about K-Klaus.”

Her eyes are burning but the tears aren’t falling. She feels sick, wrong-footed, no way to catch her balance. “You hung up,” she whispers, because her throat is closing.

Diego stumbles back as if he’s been struck.

“Stop,” Allison says, and her voice is firmer now. “Stop it.”

Vanya wonders if her sister is going to rumour her.

“Pogo,” she says, but doesn’t finish. The words die on her tongue before she even knows what she can possibly say to absolve herself. 

Pogo said he would tell them. He promised. He told her not to worry, that he would handle it, that she could turn to her own grief and trust him to inform the family. And she did, she believed him, listened to him, because it’s Pogo and he’s always been there for her. She trusts him. Had trusted him. Had shared the worst of news with him because she’d been upset and devastated and weak, and he was supposed to make things better again.

Pogo lied.

“Oh, god,” Vanya gasps, and turns away. Her knees wobble but she refuses to go down before her siblings, so she allows Mom to anchor her with a gentle hand on her shoulder. She can’t look at the others, can’t see their anger or their grief or their indifference, whatever may be painted on their faces, so she doesn’t. 

“Vanya,” someone says, but she can’t be here anymore.

Dad’s dead, Five’s back, Ben’s statue is destroyed, and Klaus is gone, gone, gone. She has no reason to stay.

Mom’s hand falls away easily as Vanya makes for the door, and no one tries to stop her.

-

A fragile tranquility cradles her as she pushes through the doors of the Academy, calls a cab, and heads home. Her thoughts are quiet, meek, and the world is soft, fuzzy. Everything is distant and dangerous, like walking a tightrope, and she doesn’t feel anything at all.

She struggles to unlock the door to her apartment, hands trembling just a little, just enough to interfere with the key. She pauses, breathes, and makes herself stop shaking. 

The apartment is empty.

As if in a trance, she drifts over to the window, to the violin case propped up on the chair. The rattling of the radiator and the faint rumbling of traffic settle over her skin, heavy and suffocating, and her heartbeat is deafening. The bow shakes in her hand.

She closes her eyes and plays.

She stands there for hours, playing with a quiet desperation, a depth of feeling, and slowly, slowly she can feel the carefully restrained knot in her chest start to unspool. It spreads through her with each pass of the bow, anger and grief and betrayal so bitter she can barely breathe. It makes her grip tighter, the notes sharper, and the music fills her up from the inside, drowning out everything else. It fills up the room like a physical thing, louder and louder, brushing over her skin and tugging at her. She moves in time with it, alternately swaying softly and moving jaggedly, and she imagines she can feel the room moving with her.

She feels everything.

Her eyes burn again and this time the tears come, disgustingly familiar, warm on her cheeks. They don’t stop and she doesn’t try to make them, swept up in playing, and nothing matters except the sounds she can make with the instrument and the way it drowns out everything else. No brothers, no sisters, no statues or lies, just Vanya and the music she’s been losing herself in since she was young.

Hyper aware of every shift and shuffle around her, she recognizes the  _ fwip  _ immediately. Her hand stills, drawing a squeal from the violin, and she crashes back into herself.

Five is standing in her living room. Her trashed living room.

Silently, she sets down the violin and scrubs at her eyes, watching her brother warily. He’s studying the room absently, hands in his pockets, and he looks as dishevelled as her apartment. 

“Is that blood?” she asks. 

He glances down at his arm. “It’s nothing,” he says, and he sounds distracted.

It’s instinct to make for the first aid kit. She still keeps it fully stocked, bandages and aspirin and naloxone, and pulling it out feels familiar. There’s still tears stuck in her eyelashes, but she’s tired and empty again, so she doesn’t address them and neither does Five. He lets her pull up his sleeve and tend to the cut on his arm, and he watches her quietly, a guarded look on his face.

“I looked it up,” he says suddenly. She pauses to look at him. “Klaus’s death,” he clarifies. She carefully doesn’t flinch. 

“Why?” she asks instead.

“Because he isn’t supposed to be dead,” he says, and she couldn’t agree more. Perhaps seeing the look on her face, Five shakes his head. “When I jumped forward and got stuck in the future, do I know what I saw?”

She shakes her head, taping the bandage down and leaning back. Nothing about the day has gone how she expected and she’s finding it hard to focus.

“Nothing,” Five says. “Absolutely nothing. As far as I could tell, I was the last person left alive. I never found out what killed the human race, but in the future I saw, Klaus didn’t overdose. I don’t know why it’s different now, and if I could change it, Vanya, I would. But there isn’t any time.” He catches her eyes and draws her in, still and serious. “The world ends in eight days, and I have no idea how to stop it.”

She blinks at him. A future where Klaus didn’t overdose, didn’t die on her watch - it hurts to think about. But Five doesn’t look like he’s kidding, and she doubts even one of her siblings would joke about this.

“I’ll put on a pot of coffee,” she says.


	7. Interlude II

When Klaus wakes up, he goes home.

Well, Vanya’s home, anyway. He’s never been very clear on whether it counts as his home too, but really it’s the closest thing he’s ever had, so he figures that probably counts for something.

Semantics aside, Vanya asked him to come home, so he does.

He picks himself up from the ground, dusts himself off, and picks a direction. He doesn’t remember where he is, exactly, but he’s spent the past decade roaming every inch of the city, so he’s sure he’ll recognize something soon. He doesn’t have any money for a cab or a card or a cake, and he thinks about stealing something for Vanya as an apology, a peace-offering, but doesn’t.

Ben trails behind him, looking even more wretched than usual. His hood is up and he keeps trying to get Klaus to stop or slow down, but Klaus learned years ago that the key is to pretend you don’t see them at all. He’s never been good at that strategy, but sometimes he likes to fake it anyway. Ben’s going to have to go blue if he wants to stop Klaus from getting to Vanya, and Klaus is never going to let that happen again so long as he can help it.

“Klaus,” Ben says, and he sounds awful. Twisted and jagged and not the bitter, cold ghost that usually passes judgment on all of Klaus’s actions. He sounds like someone who just desperately wants their brother to talk to them.

Ever since the funeral, Klaus has been all too aware that he is Ben’s only option. He resents it, sometimes, because he never asked to be like this, to be haunted like this, but he supposes Ben never asked for this either, so that resentment doesn’t usually get them anywhere. Sometimes, most of the time, when Klaus is feeling particularly petty or high, he purposely ignores Ben’s advice. He argues, he dismisses, he makes his brother watch as he runs his life into the ground - but rarely does he ever outright ignore him. At the very least, he rolls his eyes, scoffs, makes a face. Something to show that he hears, he just chooses to ignore.

Ben follows him as he wanders down the streets, tries to stop him, says his name, and Klaus ignores him.

He just has to go home.

They walk for a long time. Klaus doesn’t know where he woke up or how he got there, but it’s far from Vanya’s apartment, deep in the dark and unsavoury parts of town that Ben usually makes him avoid. That alone should be enough to scare him, to set his heart racing, because he doesn’t like straying too far from Vanya’s. He likes being able to stop by, to pass through, to look for the light in the window and maybe hear a few notes. He isn’t worried, though, because he’ll get there eventually. He keeps walking.

The light is on, the special light, his light, but the windows are empty.

He doesn’t know how long it’s been since he woke up, since he called, but he knows Vanya’s waiting for him.

Ben finally falls quiet as they approach the apartment, but Klaus can still feel his gaze on his shoulders, a weight he’s never wanted to carry. He feels guilty, or thinks he should, but it doesn’t matter right now because he’s steps away from Vanya’s door and Ben knows that Vanya is a ghost-free zone. She’s his quiet place, his peace, and over the years Ben has come to respect that, even if few other ghosts do.

It’s late, probably later than is socially acceptable to visit, but that’s never exactly stopped him before and the light’s on in the window, which means Vanya won’t care about the time. 

She’s awake anyway, which she shouldn’t be, because unlike Klaus she has an actual human adult life, with work and bills and coffee instead of colourful pick-me-ups. He thinks she’s probably waiting up for him, as she’s definitely done before, and he feels guilty again, or at least he thinks he does.

Ben quietly follows him into Van’s living room, hovers at his shoulder as they watch their sister, tired and pale and curled up at one end of the couch. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days. Like one of her brothers has gone and done something unforgivably stupid, like run away or follow Dad on one too many missions. Like stay out too late and take illicit substances from an unfamiliar dealer.

“Hey, Van,” Klaus says, quiet, ashamed, because he’s standing right there and she isn’t looking at him and it’s his fault, of course, because he knows better than to take candy from strangers. He doesn’t know how long it’s been since she told him to come home, but he knows he’s late.

Ben makes a noise beside him, strangled. “Klaus,” he says. 

“Sorry,” Klaus says, interrupting Ben, talking over him, because this is Vanya’s apartment and she comes first. “I didn’t mean to take so long. Traffic, you know.”

There are empty mugs clustered on the coffee table, leaving coffee rings on sheet music, which is funny because Vanya’s usually a stickler for coasters. He tried to knit her some once, but it had been a pathetic attempt, barely recognizable as anything other than a tangle of yarn, and they don’t really use it for its intended purpose. It sits untouched on the bookshelf, a place of honour among Klaus’s fervent scribbles of Five and a variety of notes Vanya penned and left for him to find.

( _Gone to practice. Will bring back pizza for dinner :)_

_Don’t touch the red blouse, it’s for the concert._

_Wake me before you go, please? Love you)_

“Vanya,” Klaus says again. He takes a step towards her, hesitates, and falls back. He hasn’t felt this uncertain in her home in years. 

“She can’t hear you,” Ben says, and he doesn’t sound as lost as he did before. He’s sad and sorry and angry, but he’s gathered himself from the walk over, has settled his nerves enough to slide back into his usual role. It would be comforting if Klaus wasn’t trying to ignore him, to focus on Vanya. “Klaus, I’m sorry. She can’t - ”

“I know,” he interrupts again. Ben hates when he interrupts. “I just wanted - I know.”

This surprises Ben, he thinks, which is usually something he’d take pride in because Ben has long since grown used to most of Klaus’s eccentricities. Frankly, though, Klaus doesn’t know why it’s so surprising.

Klaus has been surrounded and consumed by death his whole life. He knew what mangled bodies looked like before he could tie his own shoes, knew how to recognize the faint cold _empty_ that accompanied ghosts just as he knew how to recognize which sibling was coming up the stairs based on the sound of their footsteps. Klaus has spent many, many nights half-conscious, on the brink of dropping off to sleep, wondering how far his powers can reach while still being classified as one of the living. He’s always had one foot in the grave, entrenched in ghosts more familiar than his own family. He knows when he is one.

He’s known it since he woke up in that alley, with none of the usual aches or fog that typically accompany his overdoses. Has known it since he hung up the phone, promised Vanya he’d come home, the moment he’d taken the drugs from the dealer with empty eyes. 

Klaus kept his promise and came home, but he knows Vanya can’t see him, will never see him again, and he knows it’s his fault.

Ben is surprised. Klaus is not.

-

Being dead isn’t so different from being alive, Klaus thinks.

Maybe that’s because he’s been so tangled up in death since he was born, unable to tell where he ended and the ghosts began, so this is really just the natural progression. Maybe it’s because he wasn’t really living before anyway, chasing one high after another just to feel alive for a few hours. Maybe it’s just because he still has Ben and Vanya, the only two people Klaus ever really considered living for.

Ben calls him stupid a lot. He takes the adjustment harder than Klaus, really, even though they’ve both been marching towards this inevitably with tired resignation for years. Klaus has always kind of seen it coming, which means Ben certainly has as well. Vanya probably did too, but she never let him see it. She always seemed to believe wholeheartedly that Klaus could drag himself off the streets, away from the drugs completely one day. He’s sorry to disappoint her, but really it’s her own fault for having anything other than rock-bottom expectations of him like the rest of their siblings.

The whole thing with Ben is really one of the bigger downsides to being dead. Things haven’t been quite so awkward or tense between them since the last time one of them went ghost, and Klaus has never been eager to repeat that experience. They alternate between periods of quiet anger, where Ben can barely seem to look at him and often disappears, presumably to scream his frustrations into the void or at least at their oblivious siblings, and stretches where Ben stays glued to his side looking like a kicked puppy.

Vanya is much simpler and much more familiar.

It’s not exactly - easy, sticking with Vanya. Klaus has never seen someone mourn for him before, and he never saw the worst of Vanya’s grief for Ben, either, because by then he was more interested in hunting up anything to blur the sight of Ben’s stricken face than in seeking out his then-estranged sister to hash out their feelings. 

Logically, Klaus knows - has always kind of known, at least in these past few years - that Vanya cares. It’s the only reason she would put up with his shit for so long, the only thing that would make her keep offering her couch every time he stumbled his way to her door, high or drunk or sober and lonely. He’s always been careful about that, though, because even those that care about you have their limits. He’s flirted with Diego’s limits countless times over the years, has been dragged to diners and rehabs almost as often as he’s been kicked out and dumped at the nearest bus stop.

He never expected Vanya’s limits to surpass death, though. 

Being a ghost is frustrating. He kind of gets it now, why all the others scream and lament and moan to anyone who can hear. Years of being forced to observe and not interact are enough to drive anyone a little batty, he guesses, though personally, he doesn’t see the appeal in tormenting terrified toddlers just yet.

Even so, he still has Ben, even when he’s in a mood. That alone would probably make the whole dead thing significantly more bearable if it weren’t for Vanya.

She talks to him sometimes. She never hears when he answers, of course, but sometimes he likes to pretend when she hesitates, when she looks in his general direction. It’s not as good as actually speaking to and being with his sister again, but it’s enough to soothe the clenching of his chest when he has to stand by and watch her cry, at least a little.

Ben rolls his eyes and looks a little sad, a little angry, but Klaus likes to pretend everything is fine and it’s a normal Wednesday, holding idle chit-chat with his one remaining sister.

“Don’t forget the pickles,” he says cheerfully when Vanya reads out her grocery lists. She doesn’t like pickles, but he does, and he’s grown attached to the little shelf in the fridge that has been looking too barren for his liking.

Vanya pauses, stares in entirely the wrong direction, mutters “Pickles,” and jots it onto the list.

Ben does not return Klaus’s triumphant look.

He hums and haws in all the right places when Vanya comes back from practice with gossip, though she’s never been very good at getting to the real juicy parts. Sometimes she stops in the middle of a sentence with a funny look, face collapsing, and doesn’t continue, but that’s okay because Klaus is really bad at following stories all the way to the end too, so he doesn’t hold it against her.

He doesn’t try to say anything in the middle of the night when Vanya sometimes makes whispered confessions into the dark, because Ben usually isn’t around and there’s no one to trick. Instead, he sits at the foot of her bed and watches and aches until she falls asleep, and then he slips out to find Ben and tries to make things feel a little more normal.

It might not be a good normal, but Klaus has known his whole life that death isn’t exactly something someone can fight against or outrun, so he likes to think he’s handling this whole acceptance thing relatively well.

He wishes the grief was as easy for Ben, for Vanya. But he doesn’t think there’s really anything he can do to help with that - sometimes he still sees flashes of blue when he closes his eyes and it shouldn’t terrify him as much now because he’s already dead but it still makes the room spin and his stomach drop - so all he can do is stick by their side and pretend.

Vanya will never know it, but it makes him feel better to think he’s at least trying to uphold his promise. He still checks in once a week, every day, to make sure she’s alright. She doesn’t know he’s there, but he wishes he could tell her he’s alright too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Midterms really left me with zero time and zero motivation to write, hence the late updates on not only this fic but my others too lol
> 
> Next chapter is back to Vanya :)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it’s my birthday, and since I can’t exactly go out and celebrate this year, I decided to challenge myself to update all of my current fics. This was, perhaps, a mistake, and I’ve spent the past week cursing my life choices, but here we are. 
> 
> I'm thinking this fic will only have a few more chapters? Hard to say for sure, since initially it was only supposed to have, like, 5 chapters max, but I'm thinking ballpark maybe 10 chapters total.

She’s thirteen, still raw after losing Five, the familiar hollow pit in her chest that she’s never quite been able to fill back up again, except that doesn’t make sense, because Five is right there. He’s perched at his usual seat at the table, a carbon copy of the day he disappeared, looking at her with cool indifference, like a bug on the sidewalk. She doesn’t care, though, because he’s here, right next to her, he’s back and he’s alive and he looks completely unhurt, not at all like the horrible nightmares she’d had in the days after his disappearance.

Vanya tries to say something, to welcome him back, to ask where he’s been, to yell at him, something, anything, but she can’t move. Dad stares down the table at her, stiff and displeased, glare heavy and stifling, keeping her quiet and in her seat. She wonders why he isn’t acknowledging Five, wonders why none of them are saying anything, because this is huge, don’t they see?

But Allison is crying, silent and plastic and pretty, the same as she has almost every dinner since that last one, and she doesn’t even look up from her plate, even though Five is right there. Diego is still as stone in his seat, shrinking away from the chair next to his like it’s still empty, but it isn’t, it isn’t, and Vanya doesn’t know why they won’t say anything, don’t they care? She does, she’s always cared, but she can’t do anything, she can never do anything.

Four-Five-Six are the only ones looking at her, apart from Dad, but she’s never been able to meet Dad’s gaze like that, so she doesn’t try. Her tongue won’t unstick from the roof of her mouth, even though she doesn’t think she’ll be able to breathe past the words clogging her throat, and she keeps throwing desperate looks between her three brothers, growing steadily more and more panicked because none of them are helping.

They keep looking at her, distant and completely blank, as they smoothly rise from their seats, all four of them, Dad and the only ones who ever looked at Vanya like she mattered, and they step back from the table. Luther and Allison and Diego don’t even acknowledge them, which is strange, it’s all strange, because they know the rules, they know that if Dad leaves the table they have to follow, but they’re not moving, and Vanya is still frozen. She manages an embarrassing squeak as her brothers deliberately turn their backs on her, the sound high-pitched and small and ignored, and they follow Dad single file out of the room, like ducklings, like children, like good little soldiers, Five then Ben then Klaus.

Her face feels hot and scratchy and wet and suddenly her mouth falls open. She only spares a moment to drag in a painful, shuddery breath before she turns to more important matters.

“ **Stop** ,” she says, vaulting from her seat and stumbling after them. She leaves the other three at the table because they’re no help, and they’re not the ones she wants to see anyway. “Stop!”

Her feet feel too heavy to move, the room stretching out in front of her, miles away from the backs of Klaus’s shoes that she can see disappearing around the corner. She keeps going, keeps forcing her legs to move, because if she can just catch up then she can convince them to come back, she’ll make them, she’ll find a way, or she’ll follow, whatever she has to do to make sure she isn’t left behind.

She reaches the corner, finally, finally, and she knows she just has to take one more step and they’ll be right there. She lifts her foot - it’s like lead, stuck to the floor - she starts to tip forwards - she falls -

-

Vanya wakes up with a weight on her chest.

She takes a long moment just to blink up at her ceiling. She is hyper aware of the silence enfolding her apartment, the light filtering in from the windows, the door separating her from her brother.

Whenever Klaus stayed over, she could always feel it like a sixth sense, some subtle change in the air. He didn’t snore or make much racket unless he was drunk and operating outside of the constraints of the clock on her mantle, but he mumbled in his sleep sometimes, and she always knew he was there, could always tell the moment she woke up. She used to tell him that his personality was too big for her dingy little apartment, that it filled every room until it disturbed her from her sleep, and that’s why it never worked when he tried to sneak in during the night to surprise her.

The apartment has been achingly quiet for months now and this morning is no different.

Maybe, she thinks, Five is a quiet sleeper, an unobtrusive presence. That doesn’t fit with what she remembers of him, back when they were kids and he never let anyone forget he was there, but, she reminds herself, they aren’t kids anymore. Five’s been gone a long time.

“Hey, Five?” she says gently, shuffling out of her bedroom. She shouldn’t be surprised by the empty couch, but somehow she is. “Oh, shit.”

Her chest feels tight again, the familiar stirrings of anxiety making themselves known, and she briefly spares a thought for her pills. She halfheartedly turns towards their hiding place but loses steam as she takes in the state of her living room. Her first instinct is to blame Five, because generally when she permits a brother into her apartment and wakes up to find it in disarray, it’s because said brother had trouble keeping his hands to himself.

But that isn’t right, because Five isn’t Klaus and, evidently, he didn’t stay the night. Besides, she vaguely remembers the place being a mess before he even arrived last night, though she’s a little fuzzy on the details - she hadn’t been exactly at the top of her game at the time.

The damage isn’t too bad, she decides. A few trinkets are scattered around, unseated from their position on the bookshelf, and there’s papers littering the floor like a strong gust of wind blew through the room, but ultimately there’s no permanent harm. At worst it looks like a tantrum by a passive aggressive ghost, and that makes her think of Klaus, of course, and then she realizes it doesn’t actually matter what happened - because her brother’s dead and apparently the bitterness she’s been harboring towards their remaining siblings for the past few months over it has been entirely misplaced, since they _didn’t even know_ \- because Pogo, the one person throughout her life that she’s always been able to count on, had lied - and now her chest is getting tighter and tighter and the anxiety is like a serpent coiled around her heart and who cares about some scattered sheet music -

_He isn’t supposed to be dead._

Vanya stops. There’s a buzzing under her skin, a rattling electricity, and the sounds of the street outside her window are deafening. The bedding she’d offered Five is sitting neatly folded on the end of the couch, untouched, and his words from last night are alive around her.

_In the future I saw, Klaus didn’t overdose._

Vanya doesn’t know if she believes him. She doesn’t know if she can bring herself to. Dad always said time travel was dangerous, always warned Five against it from the time they were small, always said he wasn’t ready - and he was right, wasn’t he, in the end? Maybe Five did land in the apocalypse, maybe he didn’t, but either way he jumped headfirst into time travel and came out the worse for it on the other side. He still looks the same, is the thing. He doesn’t act the same, though, and maybe time travel messed with both his memories and his personality, but she has no way of knowing either way, not for sure. Ultimately, she has to just - trust him. Believe him, take him at his word with no proof.

She wants to.

_Klaus didn’t overdose._

Vanya doesn’t know what that means. If Five is telling the truth, then he obviously traveled to a future different from the one she’s living in now. A better one, maybe, if one can ignore the whole death-of-mankind thing, and Five’s here to stop that, anyway, and he’s always been stubborn enough to do what he wants, screw the consequences. But he’s here now and Klaus isn’t, so does that mean he’s wrong? There’s no apocalypse? But how did Five see that future, how did he find Klaus with the others, why was Klaus in the apocalypse when he isn’t here with her now?

A traitorous voice in her head whispers: _can I fix it?_

Five can travel in time. Not well, obviously. But if he can travel back to stop the end of world, maybe he can go back and -

Vanya stops.

Klaus is dead. Has been for months. This is obviously news to the others, but that, she reasons, isn’t entirely her fault. She doesn’t understand what happened, doesn’t know why Pogo lied - and she will find out, she has to, because it doesn’t make sense - but it’s not her fault that the others never cared enough to check in themselves. If they’d ever spared a thought for her or Klaus over the past few months, if they’d ever actually cared, they would have known. It wasn’t a secret.

And maybe Vanya could have - could have stopped it. Saved him. Made him come back to her apartment sooner, stopped him from turning to drugs again, kept him from that last dose. Maybe she could have done more. But he’s dead now, and maybe Dad and the others never had a funeral for him, but Vanya did, and she knows there isn’t anything that can bring him back, not even a time-travelling, traumatized teenager.

Time travel is a roll of the dice. Five thought he saw Klaus at the end of the world, but obviously he didn’t, because Klaus is dead. Vanya can’t do anything for Klaus anymore, but she has Five back now - miraculously - and she isn’t going to lose him again. She has to find him, talk to him, let him know that she’ll be here as he adjusts to being back, recovers from the time travel.

And she has to go back to the Academy anyway to look for Pogo, because she has so many questions. Besides the betrayal she can feel burning in her chest, she also needs to know what exactly happened to Klaus, with his body. Because, with slow and distant horror, she realizes that if the others didn’t know, then - was there a funeral? Was there - anything?

Everything is loud and overwhelming and all that matters is making sure Five is okay and that Klaus wasn’t left somewhere, forgotten and alone, another failure on Vanya’s part to take care of him. She should have _known_ , should have _asked_.

Pogo shouldn’t have **lied**.

-

She tells herself she feels better after talking to Five.

It’s strange seeing him back in his bedroom, in the familiar vest and shorts. Like walking straight into a photograph, but twice as jarring. He doesn’t apologize for leaving and she doesn’t expect him to, but he does seem to listen when she carefully mentions therapy and healing and acorning. She lets herself wonder, for a moment, if maybe she can have this. Maybe she can forge a relationship with a brother again, and this time hold him tight, tight enough that he won’t slip away.

He’s been through a lot, apocalypse or not, and she can try to help him through it. For a blinding second, she can even see it. Maybe he’ll crash at the Academy for a while longer, but she can find a bigger place, an extra bedroom, and he can move in with her. She already has two-bedroom listings around town printed out and tucked away safely in her bedside drawer. The second room won’t be for who she’d thought it would be, but that hardly matters now. Five will go to therapy – hell, maybe Vanya will go back, too – and he’ll take up residence in her home and her life and it will be like when they were thirteen except _better_.

But she has to pass Klaus’s room on the way down the stairs and she finds those thoughts freezing and dropping straight through the floor. She feels – guilty. One day with Five and she’s thinking about mortgages and schools. Five years with Klaus and he slept on the couch.

But it’s different. It doesn’t mean –

Klaus wouldn’t mind, if he were here. Vanya’s whole life has been turned upside down in the past 24 hours, but she knows that to be true. If Klaus were here, he’d _want_ Vanya to be there for Five. And he never minded the couch, never expected anything more – and maybe that’s the problem, but it’s not a problem she’ll ever be able to fix now, and if she lets herself go down that road then she’ll never come back.

She can still help Five. Third time’s the charm, right, and at least now Vanya has a better idea of what _not_ to do. This is a new chance to be there for Five, to be a sister, to have a brother, and she’s not going to fail at this, not again, never again. And if – if Five is right, if he really did spend years in the apocalypse, if his powers really are what he says they are – if Five is right, if he means what he says about Klaus, if he thinks he can go back – if. They’re such big ‘ifs’.

Vanya can’t do that, to Five or herself. She can’t put that hope on their shoulders. Every morning for almost four months, she’s woken up and reminded herself that Klaus is dead. She can’t stop now. Klaus is dead, but Five is here. Five, thirteen and traumatized, just finding out that half his family is dead. Of course he wants to believe he can fix it; it’s what he does. Ever since they were small, he’s always been the do-er, the fixer. But he can’t fix this. He needs her.

Vanya hears Allison before she even realizes she’s reached the bottom of the stairs.

“I would like to say hello to my daughter, if that’s alright with you,” Vanya hears, and she can’t remember the last time she ever heard Allison sound so strained. She’s always been so sure of herself, confident in her being and her words, and it’s – unsettling, to hear the note of desperation in her tone.

“No! Patrick, don’t - ”

Vanya has never been particularly close with Allison. Number Three has always towered far above her, as bright and as distant as the stars, and at best, Vanya usually feels faded out and intimidated by her superstar sister. At worst, she feels like the mud on the bottom of Allison’s heels. Sisterly affection isn’t exactly a natural feeling for her.

(Or, at least, not here. Not now.)

But Vanya is wrung out and tired and about one wrong step away from shattering, teetering along the line between defeat and fury. Her emotions still feel too big and too sharp in her hands, puzzle pieces that haven’t found their place, and she’s – discombobulated. Out of sorts.

She recognizes the look on Allison’s face.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

Allison’s shoulders tense as she slowly turns towards her. Vanya doesn’t know if the guarded expression is leftover from what was clearly an unpleasant phone call, or if it’s specifically due to her presence. Vanya has been slowly learning how to be a sister over the years, but she has no idea how to be _Allison’s_ sister.

“Yeah,” Allison sighs, letting the steel in her posture bleed out. She’s obviously lying, but Vanya doesn’t think it’s her place to call her on it.

They’re not close, and she still isn’t sure she can forgive Allison for (not knowing Klaus is dead?), but she empathizes. It’s slowly hitting her now – the less than perfect make-up, the bags under Allison’s eyes, the lack of usual poise and confidence – Allison just found out her brother died yesterday. It’s been months, yes, but Allison has only had a day to adjust, to process. Vanya remembers that feeling. She can’t take that away, can’t soothe it, but maybe she can offer this kindness, this olive branch.

“Well, I’ve never met your ex-husband,” she says, a little awkward. “But he sounds like an asshole.”

Allison huffs a little, like she wants to laugh. “That’s one word for it.”

“You know what? You’re probably better off here.”

“No, I’m probably better off with my daughter,” Allison snaps, and Vanya realizes she’s miscalculated. Allison’s grieving, yes, but – she’s mad. At Vanya.

“Of course,” Vanya stumbles. “I’m sorry, I -”

“You know, if I wanted advice, Vanya, no offense, it wouldn’t be from you,” Allison interrupts, pulling herself up, tall and commanding and familiar. “Especially not on this. You have no idea what it’s like to have a child, to love someone like this, to have a family.”

“That’s not fair,” Vanya says, more hurt than she wants to be.

“Oh, you want to talk about fair? Fair, like putting our lives on display for the whole world? Telling everyone about our childhood, secrets and stories that weren’t yours to tell? _Patrick_ read that book, Vanya. And Claire will get curious when she’s older.”

Vanya shrinks back involuntarily. The book, always the book. She doesn’t regret it, she doesn’t – it was cathartic, it was her truth, it brought her Klaus – but that doesn’t make it easier to have it thrown in her face.

Allison looks less than steady, arms folded tight across her chest, but she’s relentless. “Or what about Klaus, huh, Vanya? Was not telling us _fair_? What did we ever do to deserve that? I’m your sister.” She stops, voice breaking, and all Vanya wanted to do was help take the hurt out of her voice after the phone call, but the hurt it still there, sharper and meaner.

“I didn’t mean it to be a secret,” Vanya says, and she’s awfully shaky too. Her eyes feel hot, scratchy, but she can’t tell if she’s feeling upset or angry, hurt or offended. It’s too many things to juggle at once.

“I get it,” Allison says, but it doesn’t sound like she does. “Okay? Luther was on the moon, and Diego hung up, fine. But you didn’t even try to call me, Vanya. You didn’t even – He was my brother too.”

Vanya can’t fully remember the last time she saw Allison cry, but it was probably the last time they lost a brother. It’s becoming a pattern.

_No, he wasn’t_ , she wants to say, but even as angry and hurt as she is, she knows that’s needlessly cruel. She doesn’t really want to hurt her sister, not like that. Not with Klaus.

“I’m sorry,” she says instead. “I was upset. I wasn’t thinking - ”

“That supposed to make it better?”

Vanya’s breath catches in her throat, that horrible serpent back in her chest. Allison’s looking over her shoulder, an unhappy pinch on her face, but she doesn’t say anything in Vanya’s defense, and that shouldn’t hurt, but it does. Slowly, Vanya turns.

Diego takes up the whole doorway, exuding anger.

“You were upset,” he repeats, hard, cold. “Our brother died, and you didn’t say anything, but it’s okay. You were upset.”

“I tried to tell you,” she asserts, because instinct is telling her to step back, to cower, but there’s a shard of dissent that opens her mouth again. “You hung up, Diego, not me. If you had checked in, even once, any of you, you would have known.”

Diego shifts dangerously, eyes tight. “Screw you, Vanya,” he seethes. “I dragged his ass off the street for years. I tried to get him clean. What did you do? Let him keep going back to that shit, using the drugs while you two had a slumber party. Look where that got him.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Vanya says, feeling cold. Her hands are shaking. “I hated it. I hated seeing him like that, hated that he kept – kept doing it, but I couldn’t stop him. All I could do was try to make sure he had somewhere safe to go, food to eat, a warm place to sleep. It was more than anyone else gave him.”

This seems to offend Diego more than anything else. Even Allison looks uneasy, ashamed, looking away, and Vanya can’t help the spike of vindicative satisfaction she feels. They should be ashamed, she thinks. They should feel guilty. They _deserve_ it.

Diego recovers fast. “How dare you,” he starts, and it might be entirely subconscious, the way he automatically reaches for the knives strapped to his chest. Vanya spares a thought for what it would feel like, having one of those knives thrown at her, seeing it coming, not being able to stop it.

“Diego,” a sharp voice intercedes. For the second time, Vanya turns to the interruption, feeling separate from it all again.

Five hovers on the staircase, assessing the three of them like wayward children. A frown pulls at his mouth. His gaze lingers on Vanya. She wonders what he sees.

“We should go,” he says, looking at Diego. “Meritech’s across the city.”

Clearly reluctant, Diego doesn’t move for one breath, two. Then he rolls his shoulders, squeezes his hands into fists, and pivots sharply on his heels. He stalks away without a backwards glance.

“Vanya,” Five says, picking his way down the rest of the stairs. He pauses at her elbow, lightly touches her arm. She squeezes her eyes shut and doesn’t look at him.

After a long moment, she hears him move away, murmur something to Allison, and then leave with the familiar _fwip_. She doesn’t open her eyes until enough time has passed that she feels relatively certain she won’t see any of her siblings crowded around her.

The sight of the empty hallway is a relief, but it doesn’t ease the tight clench around her heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been finding it really hard to write lately, but reading all the comments people have left has been really lovely, so thank you so much to everyone who spares the time to write something <3


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